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By Emile Faguet 

Initiation into Philosophy 
Initiation into Literature 



INITIATION INTO 

PHILOSOPHY 



BY 

EMILE FAGUET 

OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY 

AUTHOR OF "THE CULT OP INCOMPETENCE," "INITIATION 
INTO LITERATURE," ETC. 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY 
Sir HOME GORDON, Bart. 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Ube Umfcfeerbocfcer press 

1914 



Ubc "Rnicfeetbocfter iprees, "Bew JSotft 



PREFACE 

This volume, as indicated by the title, is de- 
signed to show the way to the beginner, to 
satisfy and more especially to excite his initial 
curiosity. It affords an adequate idea of the 
march of facts and of ideas. The reader is 
led, somewhat rapidly, from the remote origins 
to the most recent efforts of the human mind. 

It should be a convenient repertory to 
which the mind may revert in order to see 
broadly the general opinion of an epoch — and 
what connected it with those that followed 
or preceded it. It aims above all at being a 
frame in which can conveniently be inscribed, 
in the course of further studies, new concep- 
tions more detailed and more thoroughly 
examined. 

It will have fulfilled its design should it 
incite to research and meditation, and if it 
prepares for them correctly. 

E. Faguet. 



CONTENTS 

Part I 
ANTIQUITY 

CHAPTER I 
BEFORE SOCRATES 

PAGE 

Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe, of the 

Creation and Constitution of the World . . 3 

CHAPTER II 

THE SOPHISTS 

Logicians and Professors of Logic, and of the Analysis 

of Ideas, and of Discussion . . . .12 

CHAPTER III 

SOCRATES 

Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Mo- 
rality Considered as the End of all Intellectual 
Activity 16 

CHAPTER IV 

PLATO 

Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist, but 
he Reverts to General Consideration of the Uni- 
verse, and Deals with Politics and Legislation . 22 



vi Contents 

CHAPTER V 
ARISTOTLE 

PAGE 

A Man of Encyclopaedic Learning; as Philosopher, 

more especially Moralist and Logician . . 31 



CHAPTER VI 

VARIOUS SCHOOLS 

The Development in Various Schools of the General 

Ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle . . 36 

CHAPTER VII 
EPICUREANISM 

Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to 
seek Happiness, and that Happiness Consists in 
Wisdom ....... 43 



CHAPTER VIII 
STOICISM 

The Passions are Diseases which can and must be 

Extirpated ....... 49 

CHAPTER IX 

ECLECTICS AND SCEPTICS 

Philosophers who Wished to Belong to No School. 
Philosophers who Decried All Schools and All 
Doctrines -53 



Contents vii 



CHAPTER X 
NEOPLATONISM 



PAGE 



Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphy- 
sicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess 59 

CHAPTER XI 

CHRISTIANITY 

Philosophic Ideas which Christianity Welcomed, 
Adopted, or Created; How it must Give a Fresh 
Aspect to All Philosophy, even that Foreign to 
Itself . 64 



Part II 
IN THE MIDDLE AGES 

CHAPTER I 

FROM THE FIFTH CENTURY TO THE THIRTEENTH 

Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma. When 
it is Declared Contrary to Dogma by the Au- 
thority of Religion, it is a Heresy. Orthodox 
and Heterodox Interpretations. Some Indepen- 
dent Philosophers ..... 85 

CHAPTER II 

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 

Influence of Aristotle. His Adoption by the Church. 

Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas . 99 



viii Contents 



CHAPTER III 
THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES 

PAGE 

Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the 
Coming Era. Great Moralists. The Kabbala. 
Sorcery no 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

It Is Fairly Accurate to Consider that from the Point 
of View of Philosophy, the Middle Ages Lasted 
until Descartes. Free-thinkers More or Less 
Disguised. Partisans of Reason Apart from 
Faith, of Observation, and of Experiment . 117 



Part III 
MODERN TIMES 

CHAPTER I 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Descartes. Cartesianism 137 

CHAPTER II 
CARTESIANS 

All the Seventeenth Century was under the Influence 
of Descartes. Port-Royal, Bossuet, F6nelon. 
Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz . . . 159 



Contents ix 

CHAPTER III 

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVEN- 
TEENTH CENTURY 

PAGE 

Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, 

General Politics, and Religious Politics . . 181 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY 

Berkeley: A Highly Idealist Philosophy which Re- 
garded Matter as Non-existent. David Hume: 
Sceptical Philosophy. The Scottish School: 
Philosophy of Common Sense . . .187 



CHAPTER V 

THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY 

Voltaire a Disciple of Locke. Rousseau a Free- 
thinking Christian, but deeply Imbued with 
Religious Sentiments. Diderot a Capricious 
Materialist. D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed 
Materialists. Condillac a Philosopher of Sensa- 
tions 196 



CHAPTER VI 

KANT 

Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it 

on Morality ....... 200 



Contents 



CHAPTER VII 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY 



PAGE 



The Great Reconstructors of the World, Analogous 
to the First Philosophers of Antiquity. Great 
General Systems, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc. 214 

CHAPTER VIII 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND 

The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism: 

Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer . . 232 

CHAPTER IX 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE 

The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin. The Positivist 
School: Auguste Comte. The Kantist School: 
Renouvier. Independent and Complex Posi- 
tivists: Taine, Renan . . . . 235 

INDEX 249 



INITIATION INTO 
PHILOSOPHY 



Part I 
ANTIQUITY 



CHAPTER I 

BEFORE SOCRATES 

Philosophical Interpreters of the Universe, of the Creation 
and Constitution of the World 

Philosophy. — The aim of philosophy is to 
seek the explanation of all things: the quest 
is for the first causes of everything, and also 
how all things are, and finally why, with what 
design, with a view to what, things are. That 
is why, taking "principle" in all the senses of 
the word, it has been called the science of first 
principles. 

Philosophy has always existed. Religions 
■ — all religions — are philosophies. They are 
indeed the most complete. But, apart from 
religions, men have sought the causes and 
principles of everything and endeavoured to 
acquire general ideas. These researches apart 
from religious dogmas in pagan antiquity are 
3 



4 Initiation into Philosophy 

the only ones with which we are here to be 
concerned. 

The Ionian School: Thales. — The Ionian 
School is the most ancient school of philo- 
sophy known. It dates back to the seventh 
century before Christ. Thales of Miletus, a 
natural philosopher and astronomer, as we 
should describe him, believed matter — 
namely, that of which all things and all 
beings are made — to be in perpetual trans- 
formation, and that these transformations 
are produced by powerful beings attached to 
every portion of matter. These powerful 
beings were gods. Everything, therefore, 
was full of gods. His philosophy was a my- 
thology. He also thought that the essential 
element of matter was water, and that it was 
water, under the influence of the gods, which 
transformed itself into earth, air, and fire, 
whilst from water, earth, air, and fire came 
everything that is in nature. 

Anaximander; Heraclitus. — Anaximander 
of Miletus, an astronomer also, and a geo- 
grapher, believed that the principle of all 



Before Socrates 5 

things is indeterminate — a kind of chaos 
wherein nothing has form or shape ; that from 
chaos come things and beings, and that they 
return thither in order to emerge again. One 
of his particular theories was that fish were the 
most ancient of animals, and that all animals 
had issued from them through successive 
transformations. This theory was revived 
for a while about fifty years ago. 

Heraclitus of Ephesus (very obscure, and 
with this epithet attached permanently to 
his name) saw all things as a perpetual 
growth — in an indefinite state of becoming. 
Nothing is; all things grow and are destined 
to eternal growth. Behind them, neverthe- 
less, there is an eternal master who does not 
change. It is our duty to resemble him as 
much as we can ; that is to say, as much as an 
ape can resemble a man. Calmness is im- 
perative: to be as motionless as transient 
beings can. The popular legend runs that 
Heraclitus "always wept"; what is known of 
him only tends to prove that he was grave, 
and did not favour emotionalism. 



6 Initiation into Philosophy 

Anaxagoras; Empedocles. — Anaxagoras of 
Clazomenas, above all else a natural philo- 
sopher, settled at Athens about 470 B.C. ; was 
the master and friend of Pericles ; was on the 
point of being put to death, as Socrates was 
later on, for the crime of indifference towards 
the religion of the Athenians, and had to take 
refuge at Lampsacus, where he died. Like 
Anaximander, he believed that everything 
emerged from something indeterminate and 
confused ; but he added that what caused the 
emergence from that state was the organizing 
intelligence, the Mind, just as in man, it is 
the intelligence which draws thought from 
cerebral undulations, and forms a clear idea 
out of a confused idea. Anaxagoras exerted 
an almost incomparable influence over Greek 
philosophy of the classical times. 

Empedocles of Agrigentum, a sort of ma- 
gician and high-priest, almost a deity, whose 
life and death are but little known, appears 
to have possessed an encyclopaedic brain. 
From him is derived the doctrine of the four 
elements, for whereas the philosophers who 



Before Socrates 7 

preceded him gave as the sole source of things 
■ — some water, others air, ochers fire, others 
the earth, he regarded them all four equally 
as the primal elements of everything. He 
believed that the world is swayed by two 
contrary forces — love and hate, the one de- 
siring eternally to unite, the other eternally 
to disintegrate. Amid this struggle goes on a 
movement of organization, incessantly re- 
tarded by hate, perpetually facilitated by 
love; and from this movement have issued — 
first, vegetation, then the lower animals, 
then the higher animals, then men. In Em- 
pedocles can be found either evident traces 
of the religion of Zoroaster of Persia (the 
perpetual antagonism of two great gods, that 
of good and that of evil), or else a curious 
coincidence with this doctrine, which will 
appear again later among the Manicheans. 
Pythagoras. — Pythagoras appears to have 
been born about B.C. 500 on the Isle of Elea, 
to have travelled much, and to have finally 
settled in Greater Greece (southern Italy). 
Pythagoras, like Empedocles, was a sort of 



8 Initiation into Philosophy- 
magician or god. His doctrine was a religion, 
the respect with which he was surrounded was 
a cult, the observances he imposed on his 
family and on his disciples were rites. What 
he taught was that the true realities, which 
do not change, were numbers. The funda- 
mental and supreme reality is one; the being 
who is one is God; from this number, which 
is one, are derived all the other numbers 
which are the foundation of beings, their 
inward cause, their essence; we are all more 
or less perfect numbers; each created thing 
is a more or less perfect number. The world, 
governed thus by combinations of numbers, 
has always existed and will always exist. It 
develops itself, however, according to a nu- 
merical series of which we do not possess the 
key, but which we can guess. As for human 
destiny it is this: we have been animated 
beings, human or animal; according as we 
have lived well or ill we shall be reincarnated 
either as superior men or as animals more or 
less inferior. This is the doctrine of metem- 
psychosis, which had many adherents in 



Before Socrates 9 

ancient days, and also in a more or less 
fanciful fashion in modern times. 

To Pythagoras have been attributed a cer- 
tain number of maxims which are called the 
Golden Verses. 

Xenophanes ; Parmenides. — Xenophanes 
of Colophon is also a "unitarian." He ac- 
cepts only one God, and of all the ancient 
philosophers appears to be the most opposed 
to mythology, to belief in a multiplicity of 
gods resembling men, a doctrine which he 
despises as being immoral. There is one 
God, eternal, immutable, immovable, who 
has no need to transfer Himself from 
one locality to another, who is without 
place, and who governs all things by His 
thought alone. 

Advancing further, Parmenides told him- 
self that if He alone really exists who is one 
and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not 
only inferior to Him, but is only a semblance, 
and that mankind, earth, sky, plants, and 
animals are only a vast illusion — phantoms, 
a mirage, which would disappear, which 



io Initiation into Philosophy 

would no longer exist, and would never have 
existed if we could perceive the Self-existent. 

Zeno; Democritus. — Zeno of Elea, who 
must be mentioned more especially because 
he was the master of that Gorgias of whom 
Socrates was the adversary, was pre-emi- 
nently a subtle dialectician in whom the 
sophist already made his appearance, and 
who embarrassed the Athenians by captious 
arguments, at the bottom of which always 
could be found this fundamental principle: 
apart from the Eternal Being all is only 
semblance; apart from Him who is all, all is 
nothing. 

Democritus of Abdera, disciple of Leucippus 
of Abdera (about whom nothing is known), is 
the inventor of the theory of atoms. Matter 
is composed of an infinite number of tiny 
indivisible bodies which are called atoms; 
these atoms from all eternity, or at least since 
the commencement of matter, have been 
endued with certain movements by which 
they attach themselves to one another, and 
agglomerate or separate, and thence is caused 



Before Socrates n 

the formation of all things, and the destruc- 
tion, which is only the disintegration, of all 
things. The soul itself is only an aggregation 
of specially tenuous and subtle atoms. It is 
probable that when a certain number of these 
atoms quit the body, sleep ensues ; that when 
nearly all depart, it causes the appearance of 
death (lethargy, catalepsy); that when they 
all depart, death occurs. We are brought into 
relation with the external world by the ad- 
vent in us of extremely subtle atoms — re- 
flections of things, semblances of things — 
which enter and mingle with the constituent 
atoms of our souls. There is nothing in our 
intelligence which has not been brought 
there by our senses, and our intelligence is 
only the combination of the atoms composing 
our souls with the atoms that external matter 
sends, so to speak, into our souls. The doc- 
trines of Democritus will be found again in 
those of Epicurus and Lucretius. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SOPHISTS 

Logicians and Professors of Logic, and of the Analysis of 
Ideas, and of Discussion 

Doctrines of the Sophists. — The Sophists 
descend from Parmenides and Zeno of Elea; 
Gorgias was the disciple of the latter. By- 
dint of thinking that all is semblance save the 
Supreme Being, who alone is real, it is very 
easy to arrive at belief in all being semblance, 
including that Being; or at least what is 
almost tantamount, that all is semblance, 
inclusive of any idea we can possibly conceive 
of the Supreme Being. To believe nothing, 
and to demonstrate that there is no reason to 
believe in anything, is the cardinal principle 
of all the Sophists. Then, it may be sug- 
gested, there is nothing for it but to be silent. 
No, there is the cultivation of one's mind 

12 



The Sophists 13 

(the only thing of the existence of which we 
are sure), so as to give it ability, readiness, 
and strength. With what object? To be- 
come a dexterous thinker, which in itself is a 
fine thing; to be also a man of consideration, 
listened to in one's city, and to arrive at its 
government. 

The Sophists accordingly gave lessons, 
especially in psychology, dialectics, and elo- 
quence. They further taught philosophy, 
but in order to demonstrate that all philo- 
sophy is false; and, as Pascal observed later, 
that to ridicule philosophy is truly philo- 
sophical. They seem to have been extremely 
intellectual, very learned, and most serious 
despite their scepticism, and to have rendered 
Greece the very great service of making a pene- 
trating analysis — the first recorded — of our 
faculty of knowledge and of the limitations, 
real, possible, or probable, of that faculty. 

Protagoras; Gorgias; Prodicus. — They 
were very numerous, the taste for their art, 
which might be called philosophical criticism, 
being widespread in Attica. It may be be- 



14 Initiation into Philosophy 

lieved, as Plato maintains, that some were of 
very mediocre capacity, and this is natural; 
but there were also some who clearly were 
eminent authorities. The most illustrious 
were Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus of 
Ceos. Protagoras seems to have been the 
most philosophical of them all, Gorgias the 
best orator and the chief professor of rhetoric, 
Prodicus the most eminent moralist and poet. 
Protagoras rejected all metaphysics — that is, 
all investigation of first causes and of the 
universe — and reduced all philosophy to the 
science of self-control with a view to happi- 
ness, and control of others with a view to 
their happiness. Like Anaxagoras, he was 
banished from the city under the charge of 
impiety, and his books were publicly burnt. 

Gorgias appears to have maintained the 
same ideas with more moderation and also 
with less profundity. He claimed, above all, 
to be able to make a good orator. According 
to Plato, it was he whom Socrates most 
persistently made the butt of his sarcasms. 

Prodicus, whom Plato himself esteemed, 



The Sophists 15 

appears to have been principally preoccupied 
with the moral problem. He was the author 
of the famous apologue which represented 
Hercules having to choose between two paths, 
the one being that of virtue, the other of 
pleasure. Like Socrates later on, he too was 
subject to the terrible accusation of impiety, 
and underwent capital punishment. The 
Sophists furnish the most important epoch 
in the history of ancient philosophy; until 
their advent the philosophic systems were 
great poems on the total of all things, known 
and unknown. The Sophists opposed these 
ambitious and precipitate generalizations, in 
which imagination had the larger share, and 
their discovery was to bring philosophy back 
to its true starting point by affirming that the 
first thing to do, and that before all else, was 
to know our own mind and its mechanism. 
Their error possibly was, while saying that it 
was the first thing to do, too often to affirm 
that it was the only thing to do ; still the fact 
remains that they were perfectly accurate in 
their assurance that it was primary. 



CHAPTER III 

SOCRATES 

Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality 
Considered as the End of all Intellectual Activity 

The Philosophy of Socrates. — Of Socrates 
nothing is known except that he was born at 
Athens, that he held many public discussions 
with all and sundry in the streets of Athens, 
and that he died under the Thirty Tyrants. 
Of his ideas we know nothing, because he 
wrote nothing, and because his disciples were 
far too intelligent; in consequence of which 
it is impossible to know if what they said was 
thought by him, had really been his ideas or 
theirs. What seems certain is that neither 
Aristophanes nor the judges at the trial of 
Socrates were completely deceived in con- 
sidering him a Sophist; for he proceeded 
from them. It is true he proceeded from 
16 



Socrates 17 

them by reaction, because evidently their 
universal scepticism had terrified him; but 
nevertheless he was their direct outcome, for 
like them he was extremely mistrustful of 
the old vast systems of philosophy, and to 
those men who pretended to know everything 
he opposed a phrase which is probably au- 
thentic: "I know that I know nothing;" for, 
like the Sophists, he wished to recall philo- 
sophy to earth from heaven, namely from meta- 
physics to the study of man, and nothing else; 
for, like the Sophists, he confined and limited 
the field with a kind of severe and imperious 
modesty which was none the less contemptu- 
ous of the audacious; for, finally, like the 
Sophists, but in this highly analogous to 
many philosophers preceding the Sophists, 
he had but a very moderate and mitigated 
respect for the religion of his fellow-citizens. 
According to what we know of Socrates 
from Xenophon, unquestionably the least 
imaginative of his disciples, Socrates, like the 
Sophists, reduced philosophy to the study of 
man; but his great and incomparable origin- 



1 8 Initiation into Philosophy 

ality lay in the fact that whereas the Sophists 
wished man to study himself in order to be 
happy, Socrates wished him to study himself 
in order to be moral, honest, and just, without 
any regard to happiness. For Socrates, every- 
thing had to tend towards morality, to con- 
tribute to it, and to be subordinated to it 
as the goal and as the final aim. He applied 
himself unceasingly, relates Xenophon, to 
examine and to determine what is good and 
evil, just and unjust, wise and foolish, brave 
and cowardly, etc. He incessantly applied 
himself, relates Aristotle — and therein he was 
as much a true professor of rhetoric as of 
morality — thoroughly to define and carefully 
to specify the meaning of words in order not 
to be put off with vague terms which are 
illusions of thought, and in order to discipline 
his mind rigorously so as to make it an organ 
for the ascertainment of truth. 

His Method. — He had dialectical methods, 
"the art of conferring," as Montaigne called 
it, more or less happy, which he had probably 
borrowed from the Sophists, that contributed 



Socrates 19 

to cause him to be considered one of them, 
and exercised a wide vogue long after him. 
He "delivered men's minds," as he himself 
said — that is, he believed, or affected to be- 
lieve, that the verities are in a latent state in 
all minds, and that it needed only patience, 
dexterity, and skilful investigation to bring 
them to light. Elsewhere, he interrogated in 
a captious fashion in order to set the inter- 
locutor in contradiction to himself and to 
make him confess that he had said what he 
had not thought he had said, agreed to what 
he had not believed he had agreed to ; and he 
triumphed maliciously over such confusions. 
In short, he seems to have been a witty and 
teasing Franklin, and to have taught true 
wisdom by laughing at everyone. Folk never 
like to be ridiculed, and no doubt the recol- 
lection of these ironies had much to do with 
the iniquitous judgment which condemned 
him, and which he seems to have challenged 
up to the last. 

His Influence. — His influence was infinite. 
It is from him that morality became the end 



20 Initiation into Philosophy 

itself, the last and supreme end of all philo- 
sophy — the reason of philosophy ; and, as was 
observed by Nietzsche, the Circe of philo- 
sophers, who enchants them, who dictates to 
them beforehand, or who modifies their sys- 
tems in advance by terrifying them as to 
what their systems may contain irreverent 
towards itself or dangerous in relation to it. 
From Socrates to Kant and thence onward, 
morality has been the Circe of philosophers, 
and morality is, as it were, the spiritual 
daughter of Socrates. On the other hand, his 
influence was terrible for the religion of 
antiquity because it directed the mind to- 
wards the idea that morality is the sole 
object worthy of knowledge, and that the 
ancient religions were immoral, or of such a 
dubious morality as to deserve the desertion 
and scorn of honest men. Christianity fought 
paganism with the arguments of the disci- 
ples of Socrates — with Socratic arguments; 
modern philosophies and creeds are all im- 
pregnated with Socraticism. When it was 
observed that the Sophists form the most 



Socrates 21 

important epoch in the history of ancient 
philosophy, it was because they taught So- 
crates to seek a philosophy which was entirely 
human and preoccupied solely with the happi- 
ness of man. This led a great mind, and in 
his track other very great minds, to direct all 
philosophy, and even all human science, 
towards the investigation of goodness, good- 
ness being regarded as the condition of 
happiness. 



CHAPTER IV 

PLATO 

Plato, like Socrates, is Pre-eminently a Moralist, but he 

Reverts to General Consideration of the Universe 

and Deals with Politics and Legislation 

Plato a Disciple of Socrates. — Plato, like 
Xenophon, was a pupil of Socrates, but 
Xenophon only wanted to be the clerk of 
Socrates; and Plato, as an enthusiastic dis- 
ciple, was at the same time very faithful and 
very unfaithful to Socrates. He was a faith- 
ful disciple to Socrates in never failing to 
place morality in the foremost rank of all 
philosophical considerations ; in that he never 
varied. He was an unfaithful disciple to 
Socrates in that, imaginative and an admira- 
ble poet, he bore back philosophy from earth 
to heaven; he did not forbid himself — quite 
the contrary — to pile up great systems about 

22 



Plato 23 

all things and to envelop the universe in his 
vast and daring conceptions. He invincibly 
established morality, the science of virtue, 
as the final goal of human knowledge, in his 
brilliant and charming Socralic Dialogues; 
he formed great systems in all the works in 
which he introduces himself as speaking in his 
own name. He was very learned, and 
acquainted with everything that had been 
written by all the philosophers before So- 
crates, particularly Heraclitus, Pythagoras, 
Parmenides, and Anaxagoras. He reconsid- 
ered all their teaching, and he himself brought 
to consideration a force and a wealth of mind 
such as appear to have had no parallel in the 
world. 

The " Ideas. " — Seeking, in his turn, what 
are the first causes of all and what is eternally 
real behind the simulations of this transient 
world, he believed in a single God, as had 
many before him; but in the bosom of this 
God, so to speak, he placed, he seemed to see, 
Ideas — that is to say, eternal types of all 
things which in this world are variable, tran- 



24 Initiation into Philosophy 

sient, and perishable. What he effected by- 
such novel, original, and powerful imagina- 
tion is clear. He replaced the Olympus of the 
populace by a spiritual Olympus ; the material 
mythology by an idealistic mythology; poly- 
theism by polyideism, if it may be so ex- 
pressed — the gods by types. Behind every 
phenomenon, stream, forest, mountain, the 
Greeks perceived a deity, a material being 
like themselves, more powerful than them-, 
selves. Behind every phenomenon, behind 
every thought as well, every feeling, every 
institution — behind everything, no matter what 
it be, Plato perceived an idea, immortal, 
eternal, indestructible, and incorruptible, 
which existed in the bosom of the Eternal, 
and of which all that comes under our ob- 
servation is only the vacillating and troubled 
reflection, and which supports, animates, and 
for a time preserves everything that we can 
perceive. Hence, all philosophy consists in 
having some knowledge of these Ideas. How 
is it possible to attain such knowledge? By 
raising the mind from the particular to the 



Plato 25 

general ; by distinguishing in each thing what 
is its permanent foundation, what it contains 
that is least changing, least variable, least 
circumstantial. For example, a man is a very 
complex being; he has countless feelings, 
countless diversified ideas, countless methods 
of conduct and existence. What is his per- 
manent foundation? It is his conscience, 
which does not vary, undergoes no trans- 
formation, always obstinately repeats the 
same thing; the foundation of man, the 
eternal idea of which every man on earth is 
here the reflection, is the consciousness of 
good; man is an incarnation on earth of that 
part of God which is the will for good; 
according as he diverges from or approaches 
more nearly to this will, is he less or more 
man. 

The Platonic Dialectic and Morality. — 
This method of raising oneself to the ideas is 
what Plato termed dialectic — that is to say, 
the art of discernment. Dialectic differenti- 
ates between the fundamental and the super- 
ficial, the permanent and the transient, the 



26 Initiation into Philosophy 

indestructible and the destructible. This is 
the supreme philosophic method which con- 
tains all the others and to which all the 
others are reduced. Upon this metaphysic 
and by the aid of this dialectic, Plato con- 
structed an extremely pure system of morality 
which was simply an Imitation of God (as, 
later on, came the Imitation of Jesus Christ). 
The whole duty of man was to be as like God 
as he could. In God exist the ideas of truth, 
goodness, beauty, greatness, power, etc. ; man 
ought to aim at relatively realizing those 
ideas which God absolutely realizes. God is 
just, or justice lies in the bosom of God, 
which is the same thing; man cannot be the 
just one, but he can be a just man, and there 
is the whole matter; for justice comprises 
everything, or, to express it differently, is the 
characteristic common to all which is valua- 
ble. Justice is goodness, justice is beautiful, 
justice is true; justice is great, because it 
reduces all particular cases to one general 
principle; justice is powerful, being the force 
which maintains, opposed to the force which 



Plato 27 

destroys; justice is eternal and invariable. 
To be just in all the meanings of the word is 
the duty of man and his proper goal. 

The Immortality of the Soul.— Plato shows 
marked reserve as to the immortality of the 
soul and as to rewards and penalties beyond 
the grave. He is neither in opposition nor 
formally favourable. We feel that he wishes 
to believe in it rather than that he is sure 
about it. He says that "it is a fine wager to 
make"; which means that even should we 
lose, it is better to believe in this possible 
gain than to disbelieve. Further, it is legiti- 
mate to conclude — both from certain passages 
in the Laws and from the beautiful theory of 
Plato on the punishment which is an expia- 
tion, and on the expiation which is medicinal 
to the soul and consequently highly desirable 
— that Plato often inclined strongly towards 
the doctrine of posthumous penalties and 
rewards, which presupposes the immortality 
of the soul. 

Platonic Love. — Platonic love, about which 
there has been so much talk and on which, 



28 Initiation into Philosophy 

consequently, we must say a word, at least to 
define it, is one of the applications of his 
moral system. As in the case of all other 
things, the idea of love is in God. There it 
exists in absolute purity, without any mixture 
of the idea of pleasure, since pleasure is 
essentially ephemeral and perishable. Love in 
God consists simply in the impassioned con- 
templation of beauty (physical and moral); 
we shall resemble God if we love beauty 
precisely in this way, without excitement or 
agitation of the senses. 

Politics. — One of the originalities in Plato 
is that he busies himself with politics — that is, 
that he makes politics a part of philosophy, 
which had barely been thought of before him 
(I say barely \ because Pythagoras was a legis- 
lator) , but which has ever since been taken into 
consideration. Plato is aristocratic, no doubt 
because his thought is generally such, inde- 
pendently of circumstances, also, perhaps, 
because he attributed the great misfortunes 
of his country which he witnessed to the 
Athenian democracy; then yet again, per- 



Plato 29 

haps, because that Athenian democracy had 
been violently hostile and sometimes cruel to 
philosophers, and more especially to his own 
master. According to Plato, just as man has 
three souls, or if it be preferred, three centres 
of activity, which govern him — intelligence 
in the head, courage in the heart, and appetite 
in the bowels — even so the city is composed 
of three classes: wise and learned men at the 
top, the warriors below, and the artisans and 
slaves lower still. The wise men will govern : 
accordingly the nations will never be happy 
save when philosophers are kings, or when 
kings are philosophers. The warriors will 
fight to defend the city, never as aggressors. 
They will form a caste — poor, stern to itself, 
and redoubtable. They will have no in- 
dividual possessions; everything will be in 
common, houses, furniture, weapons, wives 
even, and children. The people, finally, 
living in strict equality, either by equal 
partition of land, or on land cultivated in com- 
mon, will be strictly maintained in probity, 
honesty, austerity, morality, sobriety, and 



30 Initiation into Philosophy 

submissiveness. All arts, except military mu- 
sic and war dances, will be eliminated from the 
city. She needs neither poets nor painters 
not yet musicians, who corrupt morals by 
softening them, and by making all feel the 
secret pang of voluptuousness. All theories, 
whether aristocratic or tending more or less 
to communism, are derived from the politics 
of Plato either by being evolved from them 
or by harking back to them. 

The Master of the Idealistic Philosophy.— 
Plato is for all thinkers, even for his op- 
ponents, the greatest name in human philo- 
sophy. He is the supreme authority of the 
idealistic philosophy — that is, of all philo- 
sophy which believes that ideas govern the 
world, and that the world is progressing 
towards a perfection which is somewhere and 
which directs and attracts it. For those even 
who are not of his school, Plato is the most pro- 
digious of all the thinkers who have united psy- 
chological wisdom, dialectical strength, the 
power of abstraction and creative imagination, 
which last in him attains to the marvellous. 



CHAPTER V 

ARISTOTLE 

A Man of Encyclopaedic Learning; as Philosopher, more 
especially Moralist and Logician 

Aristotle, Pupil of Plato. — Aristotle of 
Stagira was a pupil of Plato, and he remem- 
bered it, as the best pupils do as a rule, in 
order to oppose him. For some years he was 
tutor to Alexander, son of Philip, the future 
Alexander the Great. He taught long at 
Athens. After the death of Alexander, being 
the target in his turn of the eternal accusa- 
tion of impiety, he was forced to retire to 
Chalcis, where he died. Aristotle is, before 
all else, a learned man. He desired to em- 
brace the whole of the knowledge of his time, 
which was then possible by dint of prodigious 
effort, and he succeeded. His works, count- 
less in number, are the record of his know- 
31 



32 Initiation into Philosophy 

ledge. They are the summa of all the sciences 
of his epoch. Here we have only to occupy 
ourselves with his more especially philosophi- 
cal ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more 
precisely, man is composed of soul and body. 
The body is composed of organs, a well- 
made piece of mechanism; the soul is its final 
purpose; the body, so to speak, results in the 
soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on the body, 
and is in it not its end but its means of acting 
upon things, and the whole forms a full and 
continuous harmony. The faculties of the 
soul are its divers aspects, and its divers 
methods of acting; for the soul is one and 
indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as 
being able to conceive what is most general, 
and in consequence it forms within us an 
intermediary between ourselves and God. 
God is unique; He is eternal; from all eter- 
nity He has given motion to matter. He is 
purely spiritual, but all is material save Him, 
and He has not, as Plato would have it, ideas 
— immaterial living personifications — resid- 
ing in His bosom. Here may be perceived, 



Aristotle 33 

in a certain sense, progress, from Plato to 
Aristotle, towards monotheism ; the Olympus 
of ideas in Plato was still a polytheism, a 
spiritual polytheism certainly, yet none the 
less a polytheism; there is no longer any 
polytheism at all in Aristotle. 

His Theories of Morals and Politics. — The 
moral system of Aristotle sometimes ap- 
proaches that of Plato, as when he deems that 
the supreme happiness is the supreme good, 
and that the supreme good is the contempla- 
tion of thought by thought — thought being 
self-sufficing ; which is approximately the imi- 
tation of God which Plato recommended. 
Sometimes, on the contrary, it is very practi- 
cal and almost mediocre, as when he makes 
it consist of a mean between the extremes, a 
just measure, a certain tact, art rather than 
science, and practical science rather than 
conscience, which will know how to dis- 
tinguish which are the practices suitable for 
an honest and a well-born man. It is only 
just to add that in detail and when after all 
deductions he describes the just man, he 



34 Initiation into Philosophy 

invites us to contemplate virtues which if not 
sublime are none the less remarkably lofty. 

His very confused political philosophy (the 
volume containing it, according to all appear- 
ance, having been composed, after his death, 
of passages and fragments and different por- 
tions of his lectures) is specially a review of 
the divergent political constitutions which 
existed throughout the Greek world. The 
tendencies, for there are no conclusions, are 
still very aristocratic, but less radically 
aristocratic than those of Plato. 

The Authority of Aristotle. — Aristotle, by 
reason of his universality, also because he is 
clearer than his master, and again because 
he dogmatises — not always, but very fre- 
quently' — instead of discussing and collating, 
had throughout both antiquity and the 
Middle Ages an authority greater than that 
of Plato, an authority which became (except 
on matters of faith) despotic and well-nigh 
sacrosanct. Since the sixteenth century he 
has been relegated to his due rank — one 
which is still very distinguished, and he has 



Aristotle 35 

been regarded as among the geniuses of the 
widest range, if not of the greatest power, 
that have appeared among men; even now 
he is very far from having lost his importance. 
For some he is a transition between the 
Greek genius — extremely subtle, but always 
poetic and always somewhat oriental — and 
the Roman genius: more positive, more 
bald, more practical, more attached to 
reality and to pure science. 



CHAPTER VI 

VARIOUS SCHOOLS 

The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas 
of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle 

The School of Plato; Theophrastus. — 

The school of Plato (not regarding Aristotle 
as belonging entirely to that school) was 
continued by Speusippus, Polemo, Xeno- 
crates, Crates, and Crantor. Owing to a 
retrograde movement, widely different from 
that of Aristotle, it dabbled in the Pythago- 
rean ideas, with which Plato was acquainted 
and which he often appreciated, but not 
blindly, and to which he never confined 
himself. 

The most brilliant pupil of Aristotle was 
Theophrastus, naturalist, botanist, and mor- 
alist. His great claim to fame among 
posterity, which knows nothing of him but 
36 



Various Schools 37 

this, is the small volume of Characters, 
which served as a model for La Bruyere, 
and before him to the comic poets of an- 
tiquity, and which is full of wit and flavour, 
and — to make use of a modern word exactly 
applicable to this ancient work — "humour." 

Schools of Megara and of Elis. — We may 
just mention the very celebrated schools 
which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown 
to us — that of Megara, which was called the 
Eristic or "wrangling" school, so marked 
was its predilection for polemics; and that 
of Elis, which appears to have been well 
versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of 
Elea and of Gorgias. 

The Cynic School: Antisthenes; Dio- 
genes. — Much more important is the Cynic 
school, because a school, which was nothing 
less than Stoicism itself, emanated or ap- 
peared to emanate from it. As often hap- 
pens, the vague commencements of Stoicism 
bore a close resemblance to its end. The 
Stoics of the last centuries of antiquity were 
a sort of mendicant friars, ill-clothed, ill- 



38 Initiation into Philosophy 

fed, of neglected appearance, despising all 
the comforts of life; the Cynics at the time 
of Alexander were much the same, professing 
that happiness is the possession of all good 
things, and that the only way to possess all 
things is to know how to do without them. 
It was Antisthenes who founded this school, 
or rather this order. He had been the pupil 
of Socrates, and there can be no doubt that 
his sole idea was to imitate Socrates by 
exaggeration. Socrates had been poor, had 
scorned wealth, had derided pleasure, and 
poured contempt on science. The cult of 
poverty, the contempt for pleasures, for 
honours, for riches, and the perfect convic- 
tion that any knowledge is perfectly useless 
to man — that is all the teaching of Antis- 
thenes. That can lead far, at least in 
systematic minds. If all is contemptible 
except individual virtue, it is reversion to 
savage and solitary existence which is 
preached: there is no more civilization or 
society or patriotism. Antisthenes in these 
ideas was surpassed by his disciples and 



Various Schools 39 

successors; they were cosmopolitans and 
anarchists. The most illustrious of this 
school — illustrious especially through his 
eccentricity — was Diogenes, who rolled on 
the ramparts of Corinth the tub which 
served him as a house, lighted his lantern 
in broad daylight on the pretext of " searching 
for a man," called himself a citizen of the 
world, was accused of being banished from 
Sinope by his fellow-countrymen and replied, 
"It was I who condemned them to remain," 
and said to Alexander, who asked him what 
he could do for him : "Get out of my sunshine ; 
you are putting me in the shade." 

Crates; Menippus; Aristippus. — Crates 
of Thebes is also mentioned, less insolent and 
better-mannered, yet also a despiser of the 
goods of this world; and Menippus, the 
maker of satires, whom Lucian, much later, 
made the most diverting interlocutor of his 
amusing dialogues. In an opposite direction, 
at the same epoch, Aristippus, a pupil of 
Socrates, like Antisthenes, founded the 
school of pleasure, and maintained that the 



40 Initiation into Philosophy 

sole search worthy of man was that of happi- 
ness, and that it was his duty to make him- 
self happy; that in consequence, it having, 
been sufficiently proved and being even self- 
evident, that happiness cannot come to us 
from without, but must be sought within 
ourselves, it is necessary to study to know 
ourselves thoroughly (and this was from 
Socrates) in order to decide what are the 
states of the mind which give us a durable, 
substantial, and, if possible, a permanent 
happiness. Now the seeker and the finder 
of substantial happiness is wisdom, or rather, 
there is no other wisdom than the art of 
distinguishing between pleasure and choosing, 
with a very refined discrimination, those 
which are genuine. Wisdom further con- 
sists in dominating misfortunes by the 
mastery of self so as not to be affected by 
them, and in dominating also pleasures even 
whilst enjoying them, so that they may not. 
obtain dominion over us; "possessing without 
being possessed" was one of his mottoes 
which Horace thus translated: "I strive to 



Various Schools 41 

subject things to myself, not myself to 
things." This eminently practical wisdom, 
which is only a highly-developed egoism, 
is that of Horace and Montaigne, and was 
expressed by Voltaire in verses that were 
sometimes felicitous. 

The School of Cyrene. — Aristippus had 
for successor in the direction of his school, 
first his daughter Arete, then his grandson. 
The Aristippists, or Cyrenaics (the school 
being established in Cyrene), frankly despised 
the gods, regarding them as inventions to 
frighten women and little children. One of 
them, Euhemerus, invented the theory, 
which in part is false and in part accurate, 
that the gods are simply heroes, kings, 
great men deified after their death by the 
gratitude or terror of the populace. As 
often happens, philosophic theories being 
essentially plastic and taking the form of the 
temperament which receives them, a certain 
Cyrenaic (Hegesias) enunciated the doctrine 
that the supreme happiness of man was 
suicide. In fact, if the object of man is 



42 Initiation into Philosophy 

happiness, since life affords far fewer joys 
than sorrows, the philosophy of happiness 
is to get rid of life, and the sole wisdom lies 
in suicide. It does not appear that Hegesias 
gave the only proof of sincere belief in this 
doctrine which can be given by anyone 
professing it. 



CHAPTER VII 

EPICUREANISM 

Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to Seek 
Happiness, and that Happiness Consists in Wisdom 

Moral Philosophy. — Continuing to feel the 
strong impulse which it had received from 
Socrates, philosophy was now for a long while 
to be almost exclusively moral philosophy. 
Only it divided very sharply in two direc- 
tions. Antisthenes and Aristippus were both 
pupils of Socrates. From Antisthenes came 
the Cynics ; from Aristippus the philosophers 
of pleasure. The Cynics gave birth to the 
Stoics, the philosophers of pleasure to the 
Epicureans, and these two great schools 
practically divided all antiquity between 
them. We will take the Epicureans first 
because, chronologically, they slightly pre- 
ceded the Stoics. 

43 



44 Initiation into Philosophy 

Epicurus. — Epicurus, born at Athens a little 
after the death of Plato, brought up at Samos 
by his parents who had been forced to expatri- 
ate themselves owing to reverses of fortune, 
returned to Athens about 305 B.C., and there 
founded a school. Personally he was a true 
wise man, sober, scrupulous, a despiser of 
pleasure, severe to himself, in practice a 
Stoic. As his general view of the universe, 
he taught approximately the doctrine of 
Democritus: the world is composed of a 
multitude of atoms, endowed with certain 
movements, which attach themselves to one 
another and combine together, and there is 
nothing else in the world. Is there not a first 
cause, a being who set all these atoms in 
motion — in short, a God? Epicurus did not 
think so. Are there gods, as the vulgar 
believe? Epicurus believed so; but he con- 
sidered that the gods are brilliant, superior, 
happy creatures, who do not trouble about 
this world, do not interfere with it, and are 
even less occupied, were it possible, with 
mankind. Also they did not create the 



Epicureanism 45 

world, for why should they have created it? 
From goodness, said Plato; but there is so 
much evil in the world that if they created it 
from goodness, they were mistaken and must 
be fools; and if they willingly permitted evil, 
they are wicked; and therefore it is chari- 
table towards them to believe that they did 
not create it. 

Epicurean Morality. — From the ethical 
point of view, Epicurus certainly attaches 
himself to Aristippus ; but with the difference 
that lies between pleasure and happiness. 
Aristippus taught that the aim of life was 
intelligent pleasure, Epicurus declared that 
the aim of life was happiness. Now, does 
happiness consist in pleasures, or does it 
exclude them? Epicurus was quite con- 
vinced that it excluded them. Like Lord 
Beaconsfield, he would say, "Life would be 
almost bearable, were it not for its plea- 
sures. " Happiness for Epicurus lay in 
"phlegm," as Philinte would put it; it lay 
in the calm of the mind that has rendered 
itself inaccessible to every emotion of pas- 



46 Initiation into Philosophy 

sion, which is never irritated, never moved, 
never annoyed, never desires, and never 
fears. Why, for instance, should we dread 
death? So long as we fear it, it is not here; 
when it arrives, we shall no longer fear it; 
then, why is it an evil? — But, during life 
itself, how about sufferings?' — We greatly 
increase our sufferings by complaints and by 
self -commiseration. If we acted in the re- 
verse way, if when we were tortured by them 
we recalled past pleasures and thought of 
pleasures to come, they would be infinitely 
mitigated.' — But, of what pleasures can a 
man speak who makes happiness consist in 
the exclusion of pleasures? The pleasures of 
the wise man are the satisfaction he feels in 
assuring himself of his own happiness. He 
finds pleasure when he controls a passion in 
order to revert to calmness; he feels pleasure 
when he converses with his friends about the 
nature of true happiness; he feels pleasure 
when he has diverted a youth from passionate 
follies or from despair, and brought him 
back to peace of mind, etc. — But what about 



Epicureanism 47 

sufferings after death? They do not exist. 
There is no hell because there is no immor- 
tality of the soul. The soul is as material as 
the body, and dies with it. 

You will say, perhaps, that this very 
severe and austere morality more nearly 
approaches to Stoicism than to the teaching 
of Aristippus. This is so true that when 
Horace confessed with a smile that he 
returned to the morality of pleasure, he did 
not say, as we should, "I feel that I am 
becoming an Epicurean," he said, "I fall 
back on the precepts of Aristippus;" and 
Seneca, a professed Stoic, cites Epicurus 
almost as often as Zeno in his lessons. It 
may not be quite accurate to state, but there 
would not be much exaggeration in affirming, 
that Epicureanism is a smiling Stoicism and 
Stoicism a gloomy Epicureanism. In the 
current use of the word we have changed 
the meaning of Epicurean to make it mean 
"addicted to pleasure." The warning must 
be given that there is no more grievous error. 

The Vogue of Epicureanism. — Epicurean- 



48 Initiation into Philosophy 

ism had an immense vogue in antiquity. 
The principal professors of it at Athens were 
Metrodorus, Hermarchus, Polystratus, and 
Apollodorus. Penetrating to Italy Epicurean- 
ism found its most brilliant representative 
in Lucretius, who of the system made a poem 
■ — the admirable De Natura Rerum; there were 
also Atticus, Horace, Pliny the younger, and 
many more. It even became a political 
opinion: the Cassarians were Epicureans, 
the Republicans Stoics. On the appear- 
ance of Christianity Epicureanism came into 
direct opposition with it, and so did Stoicism 
also; but in a far less degree. In modern 
times, as will be seen, Epicureanism has 
enjoyed a revival. 



CHAPTER VIII 

STOICISM 

The Passions are Diseases which can and must be 
Extirpated 

The Logic of Stoicism. — Stoicism existed 
as a germ in the Cynic philosophy (and also 
in Socrates) as did Epicureanism in Aris- 
tippus. Zeno was the pupil of Crates. In 
extreme youth he opened a school at Athens 
in the Pcecile. The Pcecile was a portico; 
portico in Greek is stoa, hence the name of 
Stoic. Zeno taught for about thirty years; 
then, on the approach of age, he died by his 
own hand. Zeno thought, as did Epicurus 
and Socrates, that philosophy should only be 
the science of life and that the science of 
life lay in wisdom. Wisdom consists in 
thinking justly and acting rightly; but to 
think justly only in order to act rightly — 

4 49 



50 Initiation into Philosophy 

which is quite in the spirit of Socrates, and 
eliminates all the science of research, all 
consideration of the constitution of the world 
as well as the total and even the details of 
matter. Therein is Stoicism more narrow 
than Epicureanism. 

In consequence, man needs clear, precise, 
and severe "logic" (the Stoics were the first 
to use this word) . Armed with this weapon, 
and only employing it for self-knowledge and 
self-control, man makes himself wise. The 
"wise man" of the Stoic is a kind of saint — a 
superman, as it has since been called — very 
analogous to his God. All his efforts are 
concentrated on safeguarding, conquering, 
and suppressing his passions, which are 
nothing save "diseases of the soul." In the 
external world he disregards all the "things of 
chance" — everything, that is, that does not 
depend on human will — and considers them 
as non-existent: the ailments of the body, 
pangs, sufferings, misfortunes, and humilia- 
tions are not evils, they are things indifferent. 
On the contrary, crimes and errors are such 



Stoicism 5 1 

evils that they are equally execrable, and the 
wise man should reproach himself as severely 
for the slightest fault as for the greatest 
crime — a paradoxical doctrine which has 
aroused the warmth of even respectful op- 
ponents of Stoicism, notably Cicero. 

Maxims of the Stoics. — Their most fre- 
quently repeated maxim is "abstain and 
endure"; abstain from all evil, suffer all 
aggression and so-called misfortune without 
rebelling or complaining. Another precept 
widely propagated among them and by 
them, "Live according to nature," remark- 
ably resembles an Epicurean maxim. This 
must be made clear. This precept as they 
interpreted it meant: adhere freely and 
respectfully to the laws of the universe. The 
world is a God who lives according to the 
laws He Himself made, and of which we are 
not judges. These laws surround us and 
compel us; sometimes they wound us. We 
must respect and obey them, have a sort of 
pious desire that they should operate even 
against ourselves, and live in reverent con- 



52 Initiation into Philosophy 

formity with them. Thus understood, the 
"life in conformity with nature" is nothing 
else than an aspect of the maxim, "Endure. " 
Principal Stoics. — The principal adepts 
and masters of Stoicism with and after 
Zeno were Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Aristo, and 
Herillus in Greece; at Rome, Cato, Brutus, 
Cicero to a certain degree, Thrasea, Epictetus 
(withal a Greek, who wrote in Greek), Sen- 
eca, and finally the Emperor Marcus Au- 
relius. Stoicism rapidly developed into a 
religion, having its rites, obediences, ascetic 
practices, directors of conscience, examina- 
tion of conscience, and its adepts with a 
traditional dress, long cloak, and long beard. 
It exerted considerable influence, comparable 
(comparable only) to Christianity, but it 
penetrated only the upper and middle classes 
of society in antiquity without descending, or 
barely descending, to the masses. Like 
Epicureanism, Stoicism had a renaissance in 
modern times in opposition to Christianity; 
this will be dealt with later. 



CHAPTER IX 

ECLECTICS AND SCEPTICS 

Philosophers who Wished to Belong to No School 
Philosophers who Decried All Schools and All 
Doctrines 

The Two Tendencies. — As might be ex- 
pected to happen, and as always happens, 
the multiplicity of sects brought about two 
tendencies, one consisting in selecting some- 
what arbitrarily from each sect what one 
found best in it, which is called "eclecticism, " 
the other in thinking that no school grasped 
the truth, that the truth is not to be grasped, 
which is called "scepticism." 

The Eclectics: Plutarch. — The Eclectics, 
who did not form a school, which would have 
been difficult in the spirit in which they 
acted, had only this in common, that they 
venerated the great thinkers of ancient 
53 



54 Initiation into Philosophy 

Greece, and that they felt or endeavoured to 
feel respect and toleration for all religions. 
They venerated Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, 
Epicurus, Zeno, Moses, Jesus, St. Paul, and 
loved to imagine that they were each a partial 
revelation of the great divine thought, and 
they endeavoured to reconcile these diver- 
gent revelations by proceeding on broad lines 
and general considerations. Among them 
were Moderatus, Nicomachus, Nemesius, 
etc. The most illustrious, without being 
the most profound — though his literary tal- 
ent has always kept him prominent — was 
Plutarch. His chief effort, since then often 
renewed, was to reconcile reason and faith 
(I am writing of the polytheistic faith). 
Perceiving in mythology ingenious allegories, 
he showed that under the name of allegories 
covering and containing profound ideas, 
all polytheism could be accepted by the 
reason of a Platonist, an Aristotelian, or a 
Stoic. The Eclectics had not much influence, 
and only pleased two sorts of minds: those 
who preferred knowledge rather than convic- 



Eclectics and Sceptics 55 

tion, and found in Eclecticism an agreeable 
variety of points of view; and those who liked 
to believe a little in everything, and possess- 
ing receptive but not steadfast minds were 
not far from sceptics and who might be 
called affirmative sceptics in opposition to 
the negative sceptics: sceptics who say, 
"Heavens, yes," as opposed to sceptics who 
always say, "Presumably, no." 

The Sceptics: Pyrrho. — The Sceptics 
proper were chronologically more ancient. 
The first famous Sceptic was a contempo- 
rary of Aristotle; he followed Alexander on 
his great expedition into Asia. This was 
Pyrrho. He taught, as it appears, some- 
what obscurely at Athens, and for successor 
had Timon. These philosophers, like so 
many others, sought happiness and affirmed 
that it lay in abstention from decision, in 
the mind remaining in abeyance, in aphasia. 
Pyrrho being accustomed to say that he was 
indifferent whether he was alive or dead, on 
being' asked, "Then why do you live?" 
answered: "Just because it is indifferent 



56 Initiation into Philosophy 

whether one lives or is dead." As may 
be imagined, their favourite sport was 
to draw the various schools into mutual 
opposition, to rout some by the rest, 
to show that all were strong in what 
they negatived, but weak in what they 
affirmed, and so to dismiss them in 
different directions. 

The New Academy. — Scepticism, albeit 
attenuated, softened, and less aggressive, 
reappeared in a school calling itself the New 
Academy. It claimed to adhere to Socrates 
— not without some show of reason, since 
Socrates had declared that the only thing 
he knew was that he knew nothing — and 
the essential tenet of this school was to 
affirm nothing. Only the Academicians 
believed that certain things were probable, 
more probable than others, and they are the 
founders of probabilism, which is nothing 
more than conviction accompanied with 
modesty. They were more or less moderate, 
according to personal temperament. Arcesi- 
laus was emphatically moderate, and limited 



Eclectics and Sceptics 57 

himself to the development of the critical 
faculties of his pupil. Carneades was more 
negative, and arrived at or reverted to scepti- 
cism and sophistry pure and simple. Cicero, 
with a certain foundation of Stoicism, was a 
pupil, and one of the most moderate, of the 
New Academy. 

^nesidemus ; Agrippa ; Empiricus. — Others 
built on experience itself, on the incerti- 
tude of our sensations and observations, 
on everything that can cheat us and cause 
us illusion in order to display how relative 
and how miserably partial is human know- 
ledge. Such was ^Enesidemus, whom it 
might be thought Pascal had read, so much 
does the latter give the reasons of the 
former when he is not absorbed in faith, 
and when he assumes the position of a 
sceptic precisely in order to prove the 
necessity of taking refuge in faith. Such 
was Agrippa; such, too, was Sextus Em- 
piricus, so often critical of science, who 
demonstrates (as to a slight extent M. 
Henri Poincare does in our own day) 






58 Initiation into Philosophy 

that all sciences, even those which, like 
mathematics and geometry, are proudest of 
their certainty, rest upon conventions and 
intellectual ' ' conveniences. ' ' 



CHAPTER X 

NEOPLATONISM 

Reversion to Metaphysics. Imaginative Metaphysicians 
after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess 

Alexandrinism. — Amid all this, meta- 
physics — namely, the effort to comprehend 
the universe — appears somewhat at a dis- 
count. It enjoyed a renaissance in the third 
century of our era among some teachers from 
Alexandria (hence the name of the Alexan- 
drine school) who came to lecture at Rome 
with great success. Alexandrinism is a 
11 Neoplatonism "■ — that is, a renewed Platon- 
ism and, as considered by its authors, an 
augmented one. 

Plotinus. — Plotinus taught this: God and 
matter exist. God is one, matter is multiple 
and divisible. God in Himself is incompre- 
hensible, and is only to be apprehended in his 
59 



60 Initiation into Philosophy- 
manifestations. Man rises not to compre- 
hension of Him but to the perception of Him 
by a series of degrees which are, as it were, 
the progressive purification of faith, and 
which lead us to a kind of union with Him 
resembling that of one being with another 
whom he could never see, but of whose 
presence he could have no doubt. Matter, 
that is, the universe, is an emanation from 
God, as perfume comes from a flower. All is 
not God, and only God can be God, but all is 
divine and all participates in God, just as 
each of our thoughts participates of our soul. 
Now, if all emanates from God, all also tends 
to return to Him, as bodies born of earth, 
nourished by earth, invigorated by the forces 
proceeding from the earth, tend to return to 
the earth. This is what makes the harmony 
of the world. The law of laws is, that every 
fragment of the universe derived from God 
returns to Him and desires to return to Him. 
The universe is an emanation from the 
perfect, and an effort towards perfection. 
The universe is a God in exile who has 



Neoplatonism 61 

nostalgia for himself. The universe is a 
progressive descent from God with a tend- 
ency towards reintegration with Him. 

How does this emanation from God becom- 
ing matter take place? That is a mystery; 
but it may be supposed to take place by 
successive stages. From God emanates 
spirit, impersonal spirit which is not spirit 
of this or that, but universal spirit spread 
through the whole world and animating it. 
From spirit emanates the soul, which can 
unite itself to a body and form an individual. 
The soul is less divine than spirit, which in 
turn is less divine than God, but yet retains 
divinity. From the soul emanates the body 
to which it unites itself. The body is less 
divine than the soul, which was less divine 
than spirit, which was less divine than God; 
but it still possesses divinity for it has a form, 
a figure, a design marked and impressed with 
divine spirit. Finally, matter without form 
is the most distant of the emanations from 
God, and the lowest of the descending stages 
of God. God is in Himself; He thinks in 






62 Initiation into Philosophy 

pure thought in spirit; He thinks in mixed 
and confused thought in the soul ; He feels in 
the body; He sleeps in unformed matter. 
The object of unformed matter is to acquire 
form, that is a body ; and the object of a body 
is to have a soul ; and the aim of a soul is to be 
united in spirit, and the aim of spirit is to be 
absorbed into God. 

Souls not united to bodies contemplate 
spirit and enjoy absolute happiness. Other 
souls not united to bodies, but solicited by a 
certain instinct to unite themselves to bodies, 
are of ambiguous but still very exalted na- 
ture. Souls united to bodies (our own) have 
descended far, but can raise themselves and 
be purified by contemplation of the eternal 
intelligence, and by relative union with it. 
This contemplation has several degrees, so to 
speak, of intensity, degrees which Plotinus 
termed hypostases. By perception we obtain 
a glimpse of ideas, by dialectics we penetrate 
them ; by a final hypostasis, which is ecstasy, 
we can sometimes unite ourselves directly to 
God and live in Him. 



Neoplatonism 63 

The Pupils of Plotinus. — Plotinus had as 
pupils and successors, amongst others, Por- 
phyry and Iamblichus. Porphyry achieves 
little except the exposition of the doctrine of 
his master, and shows originality only as a 
logician. Iamblichus and his school made a 
most interesting effort to revive exhausted 
and expiring paganism and to constitute a 
philosophic paganism. The philosophers of 
the school of Iamblichus are, by the way, 
magicians, charlatans, miracle-mongers, men 
as antipositivist as possible. Iamblichus 
himself sought to reconcile polytheism with 
Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a 
supreme deity, an essential deity from whom 
he made a crowd of secondary, tertiary, and 
quaternary deities to emanate, ranging from 
those purely immaterial to those inherent in 
matter. The subtle wanderings of Neo- 
platonism were continued obscurely in the 
school of Athens until it was closed for ever 
in 529 by the Emperor Justinian as being 
hostile to the religion of the Empire, which 
at that epoch was Christianity. 



CHAPTER XI 

CHRISTIANITY 

Philosophic Ideas which Christianity Welcomed, Adopted, 

or Created 

How it must Give a Fresh Aspect to All Philosophy, 

even that Foreign to Itself 

Christian Philosophy and Morality. — Chris- 
tianity spread through the Empire by the 
propaganda of the Apostles, and more es- 
pecially St. Paul, from about the year 40. 
Its success was extremely rapid, especially 
among the populace, and little by little it 
won over the upper classes. As a general 
philosophy, primitive Christianity did not 
absolutely bring more than the Hebrew 
dogmas: the unity of God, a providential 
Deity, that is, one directly interfering in 
human affairs; immortality of the soul 
with rewards and penalties beyond the grave 
(a recent theory among the Jews, yet one 
64 



Christianity 65 

anterior to Christianity). As a moral sys- 
tem, Christianity brought something so novel 
and so beautiful that it is not very probable 
that humanity will ever surpass it, which 
may be imperfectly and incompletely summed 
up thus: love of God; He must not only 
be feared as He was by the pagans and 
the ancient Jews; He must be loved passion- 
ately as a son loves his father, and all things 
must be done for this love and in considera- 
tion of this love; all men are brethren as 
sons of God, and they should love one 
another as brothers; love your neighbour as 
yourself, love him who does not love you ; love 
your enemies; be not greedy for the goods of 
this world, nor ambitious, nor proud ; for God 
loves the lowly, the humble, the suffering, 
and the miserable, and He will exalt the lowly 
and put down the mighty from their seats. 

Nothing like this had been said in all 
antiquity, and it needs extraordinary inge- 
nuity (of a highly interesting character, by 
the way), to find in ancient wisdom even a 
few traces of this doctrine. 



66 Initiation into Philosophy 

Finally, into politics, so to speak, Christi- 
anity brought this novelty: there are two 
empires, the empire of God and the empire 
of man; you do not owe everything to the 
earthly empire; you are bound to give it 
faithfully only what is needed for it to be 
strong and to preserve society; apart from 
that, and that done, you are the subject of 
God and have only to answer to God for your 
thoughts, your belief, your conscience; and 
over that portion of yourself the State has 
neither right nor authority unless it be 
usurped and tyrannical. And therein lay 
the charter of individual liberty like the 
charter of the rights of man. 

As appeal to the feelings, Christianity 
brought the story of a young God, infinitely 
good and gentle, who had never cursed, who 
had been infinitely loved, who had been per- 
secuted and betrayed, who had forgiven his 
executioners, and who died in great sufferings 
and who was to be imitated (whence came 
the thirst for martyrdom). This story in 
itself is not more affecting than that of 



Christianity 67 

Socrates, but it is that of a young martyr 
and not of an old one, and therein lies a 
marked difference for the imagination and 
emotions of the multitude. 

The Success of Christianity. — The pro- 
digious rapidity of the success of Christianity 
is easily explicable. Polytheism had no 
longer a great hold on the masses, and no 
philosophic doctrine had found or had even 
sought the path to the crowd; Christianity, 
essentially democratic, loved the weak and 
humble, had a tendency to prefer them to 
the great ones of this world, and to regard 
them as being more the children of God, 
and was therefore received by the masses as 
the only doctrine which could replace the 
worm-eaten polytheism. And in Christianity 
they saw the religion for which they were 
waiting, and in the heads of Christianity 
their own protectors and defenders. 

Its Evolution. — The evolution of Christi- 
anity was very rapid, and from a great moral 
doctrine with a minimum of rudimentary 
metaphysics it became, perchance mistakenly, 



68 Initiation into Philosophy 

a philosophy giving account, or desirous of 
giving account of everything; it so to speak 
incorporated a metaphysic, borrowed in great 
part from Greek philosophy, in great part from 
the Hebrew traditions. It possessed ideas on 
the origin of matter, and whilst maintaining 
that God was eternal, denied that matter 
was, and asserted that God created it out of 
nothing. It had theories on the essence of 
God, and saw Him in three Persons, or hypo- 
stases, one aspect of God as power, another 
as love, and the other as intelligence. It 
presented theories on the incarnation and 
humanisation of God, God being made man 
in Jesus Christ without ceasing to be God. 
It conceived new relationships of man to God, 
man having in himself powers of purgation 
and perfection, but always needing divine 
help for self-perfection (theory of grace). 
And this he must believe ; if not he would feel 
insolent pride in his freedom. It had ideas 
about the existence of evil, declaring in 
"justification of God" for having permitted 
evil on earth, that the world was a place of 



Christianity 69 

trial, and that evil was only a way of putting 
man to the test and discovering what were 
his merits. It had its notions on the rewards 
and penalties beyond the grave, hell for 
the wicked and heaven for the good, as had 
been known to antiquity, but added pur- 
gatory, a place for both punishment and 
purification by punishment, an entirely 
Platonic theory, which Plato may have 
inspired but did not himself entertain. 
Finally, it was a complete philosophy answer- 
ing, and that in a manner often admirable, 
all the questions that mankind put or could 
ever put. 

And, as so often happens, that has proved 
a weakness and a strength to it: a weakness 
because embarrassed with subtle, compli- 
cated, insoluble questions wherein mankind 
will always be involved, it was forced to 
engage in endless discussions wherein the 
bad or feeble reasons advanced by this or 
that votary compromised the whole work; 
a strength because whoever brings a rule of 
life is practically compelled to support it by 



70 Initiation into Philosophy 

general ideas bearing on the relations of 
things and to give it a place in a general 
survey of the world; otherwise he appears 
impotent, weak, disqualified to give that 
very rule of life, incapable of replying to 
the interrogations raised by that rule of life; 
and finally, lacking in authority. 

Schisms and Heresies. — Right or wrong, 
and it is difficult and highly hazardous to 
decide the question, Christianity was a com- 
plete philosophy, which was why it had its 
schisms and heresies, a certain number of 
sincere Christians not resolving the meta- 
physical questions in the way of the major- 
ity,. Heresies were innumerable; only the 
two shall be cited which are deeply interest- 
ing in the history of philosophy. Manes, an 
Arab (and Arabia was then a Persian pro- 
vince), revived the old Zoroastrian doctrine 
of two principles of good and evil, and saw in 
the world two contending gods, the God of 
perfection and the god of sin, and laid upon 
man the duty of assisting the God of goodness 
so that His kingdom should come and cause 



Christianity 71 

the destruction of evil in the world. From 
him proceeded the Manicheans, who exerted 
great influence and were condemned by 
many Councils until their sect died out, only 
to reappear or seem to reappear fairly often 
in the Middle Ages and in modern times. 

Arius denied the Trinity, believing only in 
one God, not only unique, but in one Person, 
and in consequence denied the divinity of 
Jesus Christ. He was perpetually involved 
in controversies and polemics, supported by 
some Bishops, opposed by the majority. 
After his death his doctrine spread strangely. 
It was stifled in the East by Theodosius, 
but was widely adopted by the "barbarians" 
of the West (Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, 
Lombards). It was revived, more or less 
exactly, after the Reformation, among the 
Socinians. 

Rome and Christianity. — The relations of 
Christianity with the Roman government 
were in the highest degree tragic, as is com- 
mon knowledge. There were ten sanguinary 
persecutions, some being atrocious. It has 



72 Initiation into Philosophy 

often been asked what was the cause of this 
animosity against the Christians on the part 
of a government which tolerated all religions 
and all philosophies. Persecutions were 
natural at Athens where a democracy, 
obstinately attached to the local deities, 
treated as enemies of the country those who 
did not take these gods into consideration; 
persecutions were natural on the part of a 
Calvin or a Louis XIV who combined in 
themselves the two authorities and would 
not admit that anyone in the State had the 
right to think differently from its head; but 
it has been argued that they were incompre- 
hensible on the part of a government which 
admitted all cults and all doctrines. The 
explanation perhaps primarily lies in the 
fact that Christianity was essentially popu- 
lar, and that the government saw in it not 
only plebeianism, which was disquieting, but 
an organisation of plebeianism, which was 
still more so. The administration of religion 
had always been in the hands of the aristo- 
cracy; the Roman pontiffs were patricians, 



Christianity 73 

the Emperor was the sovereign pontiff; to 
yield obedience, even were it only spiritually, 
to private men as priests was to be diso- 
bedient to the Roman aristocracy, to the 
Emperor himself, and was properly speaking 
a revolt. 

A further explanation, perhaps, is that 
each new religion that was introduced at 
Rome did not oppose and did not contradict 
polytheism, the principle of polytheism being 
precisely that there are many gods; whereas 
Christianity denying all those gods and 
affirming that there is only one, and that all 
others must be despised as non-existent, 
inveighed against, denied, and ruined or 
threatened to destroy the very essence of 
polytheism. It was not a variation, it was a 
heresy; it was more than heretical, it was 
anarchical; it did not only condemn this or 
that religion, but even the very tolerance 
with which the Roman government accepted 
all religions. Hence it is natural enough that 
it should have been combated to the utmost 
by practically all the Emperors, from the 



74 Initiation into Philosophy 

most execrable, such as Nero, to the best, 
such as Marcus Aurelius. 

Christianity and the Philosophers. — The 

relations of Christianity with philosophy 
were confused. The immense majority of 
philosophers rejected it, considering their 
own views superior to it, and moreover, 
feeling it to be formidable, made use against 
it of all that could be found beautiful, spe- 
cious, or expedient in ancient philosophy; 
and the ardour of Neoplatonism, which 
we have considered, in part arose from pre- 
cisely this instinct of rivalry and of struggle. 
At that epoch there was a throng of men 
like Ernest Havet presenting Hellenism in 
opposition to Christianity, and Ernest Havet 
is only a Neoplatonist of the nineteenth 
century. 

A certain number of philosophers, never- 
theless, either on the Jewish-Christian side or 
on the Hellenic, tried some reconciliation 
either as Jews making advances to Hellenism 
or as Greeks admitting there was something 
acceptable on the part of Si on. Aristobulus, 



Christianity 75 

a Jew (prior to Jesus Christ), seems to have 
endeavoured to bring Moses into agreement 
with Plato; Philo (a Jew contemporary with 
and surviving Jesus Christ and a non-Christ- 
ian), about whom there is more information, 
throughout his life pursued the plan of 
demonstrating all the resemblances he could 
discover between Plato and the Old Testa- 
ment, much in the same way as in our time 
some have striven to point out the surprising 
agreement of the Darwinian theory with 
Genesis. He was called the Jewish Plato, 
and at Alexandria it was said: "Philo imi- 
tates Plato or Plato imitates Philo." 

On their side, later on, certain eclectic 
Greeks already cited, Moderatus, Nicoma- 
chus, Nemesius, extended goodwill so far as 
to take into account, if not Jesus, at least 
Moses, and to admit Israelitish thought into 
the history of philosophy and of human wis- 
dom. But, in general it was by the schools 
of philosophy and by the ever dwindling 
section of society priding itself upon its 
philosophy that Christianity was most de- 



76 Initiation into Philosophy 

cisively repulsed, thrust on one side and 
misunderstood. 

Christian Philosophers. — Without dealing 
with many others who belong more espe- 
cially to the history of the Church rather 
than to that of philosophy, the Christians 
did not lack two very illustrious philosophers 
who must receive attention — Origen and St. 
Augustine. 

Origen. — Origen was a native of Alexan- 
dria at the close of the second century, and 
a pupil of St. Clement of Alexandria. A 
Christian and a Platonist, in order to give 
himself permission and excuse for reconciling 
the two doctrines, he alleged that the Apos- 
tles had given only so much of the Christian 
teaching as the multitude could comprehend, 
and that the learned could interpret it in a 
manner more subtle, more profound, and 
more complete. Having observed this pre- 
caution, he revealed his system, which was 
this: God is a pure spirit. He already has 
descended one step in spirits which are 
emanations from Him. These spirits are 



Christianity 77 

capable of good and evil. When addicted 
to evil, they clothe themselves with matter 
and become souls in bodies; — which is what 
we are. There are others lower than our- 
selves. There are impure spirits which have 
clothed themselves with unclean bodies; 
these are demons. Now, as the fallen breth- 
ren of angels, we are free, less free than they, 
but still free. Through this freedom we can 
in our present existence either raise or lower 
ourselves. But this freedom does not suffice 
us; a little help is essential. This help comes 
to us from the spirits which have remained 
pure. The help they afford us is opposed by 
the efforts of the utterly fallen spirits who 
are lower in the scale than ourselves. To 
combat these fallen spirits, to help the pure 
spirits who help us, and to help them to help 
us, such is our duty in this life, which is a 
medicine, the medicine of Plato, namely a 
punishment; sterile when it is not accepted 
by us, salutary when gratefully accepted by 
us, it then becomes expiation and in con- 
sequence purification. The part of the Re- 



78 Initiation into Philosophy 

deemer in all this is the same as that of the 
spirits, but on a grander and more decisive 
plane. King of spirits, Spirit of spirits, by 
revelation He illumines our confused intelli- 
gence and fortifies our weak will against 
temptation. 

St. Augustine. — St. Augustine of Tagaste 
(in Africa), long a pagan exercising the pro- 
fession of professor of rhetoric, became a 
Christian and was Bishop of Hippo. It is he 
who "fixed" the Christian doctrine in the 
way most suitable to and most acceptable to 
Western intelligence. Instead of confusing 
it, more or less intentionally, more or less 
inadvertently, with philosophy, he exerted 
all his great talents to make the most precise 
distinction from it. Philosophers (he says) 
have always regarded the world as an ema- 
nation from God. Then all is God. Such is 
not the way to reason. There is no ema- 
nation, but creation; God created the world 
and has remained distinct from it. He lives 
in it in such a way that we live in Him; in 
Him we live and move and have our being; 



Christianity 79 

He dwells throughout the world, but He 
is not the world ; He is everywhere but He is 
not all. God created the world. Then, 
can it be said that before the world was 
created God remained doing nothing during 
an immense space of time? Certainly not, 
because time only began at the creation of 
the world. God is outside time. The eter- 
nal is the absence of time. God, therefore, 
was not an instant before He created the 
world. Or, if it be preferred, there was an 
eternity before the birth of the world. But 
it is the same thing; for eternity is the non- 
existence of time. 

Some understand God in three Persons as 
three Gods. This polytheism, this paganism 
must be rejected. But how to understand? 
How? You feel in yourself several souls? 
No. And yet there are several faculties of 
the soul. The three Persons of God are the 
three divine faculties. Man has body and 
soul. No one ought to have doubts about 
the soul, for to have doubts presupposes 
thought, and to think is to be; above all 



80 Initiation into Philosophy 

things we are thinking beings. But what is 
the soul? Something immaterial, assuredly, 
since it can conceive immaterial things, such 
as a line, a point, surface, space. It is as 
necessary for the soul to be immaterial in 
order to be able to grasp the immaterial, as 
it is necessary for the hand to be material 
in order that it can grasp a stone. 

Whence comes the soul? From the souls 
of ancestors by transmission? This is not 
probable, for this would be to regard it as 
material. From God by emanation? This 
is inadmissible; it is the same error as be- 
lieving that the world emanates from God. 
Here, too, there is no emanation, but crea- 
tion. God creates the souls in destination 
for bodies themselves born from heredity. 
Once the body is destroyed, what becomes 
of the soul? It cannot perish; for thought 
not being dependent upon the senses, there 
is no reason for its disappearance on the 
disappearance of the senses. 

Human liberty is an assured fact; we are 
free to do good or evil. But then God has 



Christianity 81 

not been able to know in advance what I 
shall do to-day, and in consequence God, at 
least in His knowledge, has limitations, is 
not omnipotent. St. Augustine replies con- 
fusedly (for the question is undoubtedly 
insoluble) that we have an illusion of liberty, 
an illusion that we are free, which suffices for 
us to acquire merit if we do right and demerit 
if we do wrong, and that this illusion of 
liberty is a relative liberty, which leaves the 
prescience of God, and therefore His omni- 
potence, absolute. Man is also extremely 
weak, debilitated, and incapable of good on 
account of original sin, the sin of our first 
parents, which is transmitted to us through 
heredity and paralyses us. But God helps 
us, and this is what is termed grace. He 
helps us gratuitously, as is indicated by the 
word "grace" — if He wishes and when He 
wishes and in the measure that He wishes. 
From this arises the doctrine of "predesti- 
nation," by which it is preordained whether 
a man is to be saved or lost. 

6 



Part II 
IN THE MIDDLE AGES 









83 



CHAPTER I 

FROM THE FIFTH CENTURY TO THE THIRTEENTH 

Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma 

When it is Declared Contrary to Dogma by the Authority 

of Religion, it is a Heresy 

Orthodox and Heterodox Interpretations 

Some Independent Philosophers 

Dogma. — After the invasion of the bar- 
barians, philosophy, like literature, sought 
refuge in monasteries and in the schools 
which prelates instituted and maintained 
near them. But the Church does not per- 
mit the free search for truth. The truth 
has been established by the Fathers of the 
Church and fixed by the Councils. Thence- 
forth the philosophic life, so to speak, which 
had never been interrupted, assumed a fresh 
character. Within the Church it sheltered — 
I will not say disguised — itself under the 
interpretation of dogma; it became a sort of 
85 



86 Initiation into Philosophy 

respectful auxiliary of theology, and was 
accordingly called the "handmaid of theo- 
logy," ancilla theologies. When emanci- 
pated, when departing from dogma, it is a 
"heresy," and all the great heresies are 
nothing else than schools of philosophy, 
which is why heresies must come into a his- 
tory of philosophy. And at last, but only 
towards the close of the Middle Ages, lay 
thought without disturbing itself about 
dogma and no longer . thinking about its 
interpretation, created philosophic doctrines 
exactly as the philosophers of antiquity in- 
vented them apart from religion, to which 
they were either hostile or indifferent. 

Scholasticism: Scotus Erigena. — The or- 
thodox philosophy of the Middle Ages was 
the scholastic. Scholasticism consisted in 
amassing and in making known scientific 
facts and matters of knowledge of which it 
was useful for a well-bred man not to be 
ignorant and for this purpose encyclopaedias 
were constructed; on the other hand, it 
consisted not precisely in the reconciliation 



Fifth Century to the Thirteenth 87 

of faith with reason, not precisely and far 
less in the submission of faith to the criticism 
of reason, but in making faith sensible to 
reason, as had been the office of the Fathers 
of the Church, more especially St. Augustine. 
Scotus Erigena, a Scotsman attached to 
the Palatine Academy of Charles the Bald, 
lived in the eleventh century. He was 
extremely learned. His philosophy was Pla- 
tonic, or rather the bent of his mind was 
Platonic. God is the absolute Being; He 
is unnamable, since any name is a delimi- 
tation of the being; He is absolutely and 
infinitely. As the creator of all and un- 
created, He is the cause per se; as the goal 
to which all things tend, He is the supreme 
end. The human soul is of impenetrable 
essence like God Himself; accordingly, it is 
God in us. We have fallen through the 
body and, whilst in the flesh, we can, by vir- 
tue and more especially by the virtue of 
penitence, raise ourselves to the height of 
the angels. The world is the continuous 
creation of God. It must not be said that 



88 Initiation into Philosophy 

God created the world, but that He creates it ; 
for if He ceased from sustaining it, the world 
would no longer exist. God is perpetual 
creation and perpetual attraction. He 
draws all beings to Himself, and in the end 
He will have them all in Himself. There is 
predestination to perfection in everything. 
These theories, some of which, as has been 
seen, go beyond dogma and form at least 
the beginning of heresy, are all impregnated 
with Platonism, especially with Neoplaton- 
ism, and lead to the supposition that Scotus 
Erigena possessed very wide Greek learning. 
Arabian Science.— A great literary and 
philosophical fact in the eighth century was 
the invasion of the Arabs. Mahometans suc- 
cessively invaded Syria, Persia, Africa, and 
Spain, forming a crescent, the two points of 
which touched the two extremities of Europe. 
Inquisitive and sagacious pupils of the 
Greeks in Africa and Asia, they founded 
everywhere brilliant universities which 
rapidly acquired renown (Bagdad, Bassorah, 
Cordova, Granada, Seville, Murcia) and 



Fifth Century to the Thirteenth 89 

brought to Europe a new quota of science ; for 
instance, all the works of Aristotle, of which 
Western Europe possessed practically nothing. 
Students greedy for knowledge came to 
learn from them in Spain; for instance, Ger- 
bert, who developed into a man of great 
learning, who taught at Rheims and became 
Pope. Individually the Arabs were often 
great philosophers, and at least the names 
must be mentioned of Avicenna (a Neo- 
platonist of the tenth century) and Averroes 
(an Aristotelian of the twelfth century who 
betrayed tendencies towards admitting the 
eternity of nature, and its evolution through 
its own initiative during the course of time). 
Their doctrines were propagated, and the 
ancient books which they made known be- 
came widely diffused. From them dates 
the sway of Aristotle throughout the middle 
ages. 

St. Anselm — St. Anselm, in the eleventh 
century, a Savoyard, who was long Abbot 
of Bee in Normandy and died Archbishop 
of Canterbury, is one of the most illustrious 



90 Initiation into Philosophy 

doctors of philosophy in the service of theo- 
logy that ever lived. ' ' A new St. Augustine ' ' 
(as he has been called), he starts from faith 
to arrive at faith after it has been rendered 
sensible to reason. Like St. Augustine he 
says: "I believe in order to understand" 
(well persuaded that if I never believed I 
should never understand), and he adds what 
had been in the thought of St. Augustine: 
"I understand in order to believe." St. 
Anselm proved the existence of God by 
the most abstract arguments. For example, 
"It is necessary to have a cause, one or 
multiple; one is God; multiple, it can be 
derived from one single cause, and that one 
cause is God; it can be a particular cause in 
each thing caused ; but then it is necessary to 
suppose a personal force which must itself 
have a cause and thus we work back to a 
common cause, that is to say to a single one. " 
He proved God again by the proof which 
has remained famous under the name of 
the argument of St. Anselm: To conceive 
God is to prove that He is; the conception of 



Fifth Century to the Thirteenth 91 

God is proof of His existence; for every idea 
has its object; above all, an idea which has 
infinity for object takes for granted the ex- 
istence of infinity ; for all being finite here be- 
low, what would give the idea of infinity to 
the human mind? Therefore, if the human 
brain has the idea of infinity it is because of 
the existence of infinity. The argument is 
perhaps open to difference of opinion, but 
as proof of a singular vigour of mind on the 
part of its author, it is indisputable. 

Highly intellectual also is his explanation 
of the necessity of redemption. Cur Deus 
Homo? (the title of one of his works) asked 
St. Anselm. Because sin in relation to an 
infinite God is an infinite crime. Man, 
finite and limited in capacity, could therefore 
never expiate it. Then what could God do to 
avenge His honour and to have satisfaction 
rendered to Him? He could only make 
Himself man without ceasing to be God, in 
order that as man He should offer to God a 
reparation to which as God He would give 
the character of infinitude. It was there- 



92 Initiation into Philosophy 

fore absolutely necessary that at a given 
moment man should become God, which 
could only be done upon the condition that 
God made Himself man. 

Realists; Nominalists; Conceptualists.— 
It was in the time of St. Anselm that there 
arose the celebrated philosophic quarrel 
between the "realists, nominalists, and 
conceptualists." It is here essential to 
employ these technical terms or else not to 
allude to the dispute at all, because the strife 
is above all a war of words. The realists (of 
whom St. Anselm was one), said: "The ideas 
(idea of virtue, idea of sin, idea of greatness, 
idea of littleness) are realities; they exist, in a 
spiritual manner of course, but they really 
exist; they are: there is a virtue, a sin, a 
greatness, a littleness, a reason, etc. (and 
this was an exact reminiscence of the ideas 
of Plato). It is indeed only the idea, the 
general, the universal, which is real, and the 
particular has only the appearance of reality. 
Men do not exist, the individual man does 
not exist; what exists is 'man' in general, 



Fifth Century to the Thirteenth 93 

and individual men are only the appearance 
of — the coloured reflections of — the univer- 
sal man." The nominalists (Roscelin the 
Canon of Compiegne, for instance) answered : 
"No; the general ideas, the universals as 
you say, are only names, are only words, 
emissions of the voice, labels, if you like, 
which we place on such and such categories 
of facts observed by us; there is no greatness; 
there are a certain number of great things, 
and when we think of them we inscribe this 
word 'greatness' on the general idea which 
we conceive. 'Man' does not exist; there 
are men and the word humanity is only 
a word which to us represents a collective 
idea." 

Why did the realists cling so to their uni- 
versals, held to be realities and the sole reali- 
ties? For many reasons. If the individual 
alone be real, there are not three Persons in 
the Godhead, there are three Gods and the 
unity of God is not real, it is only a word, 
and God is not real, He is only an utter- 
ance of the voice. If the individual is not 



94 Initiation into Philosophy 

real, the Church is not real; she does not 
exist, there only exist Christians who possess 
freedom of thought and of faith. Now 
the Church is real and it is not only- 
desirable that she should be real, but even 
that she alone should possess reality and that 
the individuals constituting her should exist 
by her and not by themselves. (This is 
precisely the doctrine with regard to society 
now current among certain philosophers: 
society exists independently of its members; 
it has laws of its own independently of its 
members; it is a reality on its own basis; 
and its members are by it, not it by them, 
and therefore they should obey it ; M. Durck- 
heim is a "realist.") 

Abelard of Nantes, pupil of the nominalist, 
William of Champeaux, learned man, artist, 
man of letters, an incomparable orator, tried 
to effect a conciliation. He said: "The uni- 
versal is not a reality, certainly; but it is 
something more than a simple word; it is a 
conception of the mind, which is something 
more than an utterance of the voice. As 



Fifth Century to the Thirteenth 95 

conception of the mind, in fact, it lives with 
a life which goes beyond the individual, 
because it can be common to several individ- 
uals, to many individuals, and because in 
fact it is common to them. The general idea 
that I have and which I have communicated 
to my hearers, and which returns to me from 
my hearers, is more than a word since it 
is a link between my hearers and myself, and 
an atmosphere in which I and my hearers 
live. Is the Church only to be a word? 
God forbid that I should say so. She is a 
bond between all Christians; she is a general 
idea common to them all, so that in her each 
individual feels himself several, feels himself 
many; although it is true that were she not 
believed in by anyone she would be nothing. " 
At bottom he was a nominalist, but more 
subtle, also more profound and more precise, 
having a better grasp of what William of 
Champeaux had desired to say. He shared 
in his condemnation. 

Apart from the great dispute, his ideas 
were singularly broad and bold. Half know- 



96 Initiation into Philosophy 

ing, half guessing at ancient philosophy, he 
held it in high esteem; he found there, 
because he delighted in finding there, all the 
Christian ideas: the one God, the Trinity, 
the Incarnation, the imputation of the 
merits of the saints, original sin; and he 
found less of a gulf between ancient philo- 
sophy and Christianity than between the 
Old and the New Testament (this is because 
the only Christianity known to Abelard, 
not the primitive but that constituted in 
the fourth century, was profoundly impreg- 
nated with Hellenism). He believed the 
Holy Ghost to have revealed Himself; to the 
wise men of antiquity as well as to the Jews 
and the Christians, and that virtuous pagans 
may have been saved. The moral philo- 
sophy of Abelard is very elevated and pure. 
Our acts proceed from God ; for it is impossi- 
ble that they should not; but He permits us 
the faculty of disobedience "in order that 
virtue may exist," to which it tends; for if 
the tendency to evil did not exist, there 
would be no possibility of effort against evil, 



Fifth Century to the Thirteenth 97 

and if no efforts, then no virtue; God, who 
cannot be virtuous since He cannot be tempted 
by evil, can be virtuous in man, which is why 
He leaves him the tendency to evil for him to 
triumph over it and be virtuous so that vir- 
tue may exist ; even if He were Himself to lead 
us into temptation, the tendency would still 
be the same; He would only lead us into it 
to give us the opportunity for struggle and 
victory, and therefore in order that virtue 
might exist ; the possibility of sin is the condi- 
tion of virtue, and in consequence, even in the 
admission of this possibility and above all by 
its admission, God is virtuous. 

The bad deed, furthermore, is not the most 
considerable from the point of view of guilt; 
as merit or demerit the intention is worth as 
much as the deed and he is criminal who has 
had the intention to be so (which is clearly 
according to the Gospel). 

Hugo de Saint-Victor; Richard. — Abelard 

possessed perhaps the broadest and greatest 

mind of the whole of the Middle Ages. After 

these famous names must be mentioned Hugo 

7 



98 Initiation into Philosophy 

de Saint- Victor, a somewhat obscure mystic 
of German origin; and the not less mystical 
Richard, who, thoroughly persuaded that 
God is not attained by reason but by feeling, 
taught exaltation to Him by detachment 
from self and by six degrees: renunciation, 
elevation, impulsion, precipitation, ecstasy, 
and absorption. 



CHAPTER II 

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 

Influence of Aristotle 
His Adoption by the Church. Religious Philosophy of St. 
Thomas Aquinas 

Aristotle and the Church. — From the thir- 
teenth century, Aristotle, completely known 
and translated into Latin, was adopted by 
the Church and became in some sort its lay 
vicar. He was regarded, and I think rightly, 
as of all the Greek thinkers the least danger- 
ous to her and as the one to whom could be 
left all the scientific instruction whilst she 
reserved to herself all the religious teaching. 
Aristotle, in fact, "defended her from Plato, " 
in whom were always found some germs 
of adoration of this world, or some tendencies 
in this direction, in whom was also found a 
certain polytheism much disguised, or rather 

99 



ioo Initiation into Philosophy 

much purified, but actual and dangerous; 
therefore, from the moment when it became 
necessary to select, Aristotle was tolerated 
and finally invested with office. 

St. Thomas Aquinas. — As Aristotelian theo- 
logians must be cited William of Auvergne, 
Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus; but 
the sovereign name of this period of the 
history of philosophy is St. Thomas Aquinas. 
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote several small 
works but, surpassing them all, the Summa 
(encyclopaedia) which bears his name. In 
general philosophy St. Thomas Aquinas is an 
Aristotelian, bending but not distorting the 
ideas of Aristotle to Christian conceptions. 
Like Aristotle, he demonstrated God by the 
existence of motion and the necessity of a first 
motive power; he further demonstrated it by 
the contingent, relative, and imperfect char- 
acter of all here below: "There is in things 
more or less goodness, more or less truth." 
But we only affirm the more or less of a 
thing by comparing it with something abso- 
lute and as it approaches more or less to this 



The Thirteenth Century 101 

absolute; there is therefore an absolute 
bemg, namely God — and this argument 
appeared to him better than that of St. 
Anselm, which he refuted. 

His Conception of Nature. — He showed 
the whole of nature as a great hierarchy, 
proceeding from the least perfect and the 
most shapeless to the most complete and 
determinate; from another aspect, as sepa- 
rated into two great kingdoms, that of 
necessity (mineral, vegetable, animal), and 
that of grace (humanity). He displayed it 
willed by God, projected by God, created by 
God ; governed by God according to antece- 
dent and consequent wills, that is, by general 
wills (God desires man to be saved) and by 
particular wills (God wishes the sinner to be 
punished) , and the union of the general wills is 
the creation, and the result of all the particu- 
lar wills is Providence. Nature and man with 
it are the work not only of the power but of 
the goodness of God, and it is by love that 
He created us and we must render Him love 
for love, which is involuntarily done by 



102 Initiation into Philosophy 

Nature herself in her obedience to His 
laws, and which we must do voluntarily by 
obedience to His commandments. 

The Soul. — Our soul is immaterial and 
more complete than that of animals, for 
St. Thomas does not formally deny that 
animals have souls; the instinct of animals 
is the sensitive soul according to Aristotle, 
which is capable of four faculties : sensibility, 
imagination, memory, and estimation, that 
is elementary intelligence: "The bird picks 
up straw, not because it gratifies her feelings 
[not by a movement of sensibility], but 
because it serves to make her nest. It is 
therefore necessary that an animal should 
perceive those intuitions which do not come 
within the scope of the senses. It is by 
opinion or estimation that it perceives these 
intuitions, these distant ends." We, man- 
kind, possess a soul which is sensibility, 
imagination, memory, and reason. Reason 
is the faculty not only of having ideas, but of 
establishing connections and chains of con- 
nection between the ideas and of conceiving 



The Thirteenth Century 103 

general ideas. Reason pauses before reach- 
ing God because the idea of God precisely is 
the only one which cannot be brought to the 
mind by the interrelation of ideas, for God 
surpasses all ideas; the idea of God is given 
by faith, which can be subsequently helped 
by reason, for the latter can work to make 
faith perceptible to reason. 

Our soul is full of passions, divisible into 
two great categories, the passions of desire 
and those of anger. The passions of desire 
are rapid or violent movements towards some 
object which seems to us a good ; the passions 
of anger are movements of revolt against 
something which opposes our movement 
towards a good. The common root of all 
the passions is love, for it is obvious that 
from it are derived the passions of desire; 
and as for the passions of wrath they would 
not exist if we had no love of anything, in 
which case our desire not coming into colli- 
sion would not turn into revolt against the 
obstacle. We are free to do good or evil, to 
master our evil passions and to follow those 



104 Initiation into Philosophy 

of which reason approves. Here reappears 
the objection of the knowledge God must 
have beforehand of our actions: if God fore- 
sees our actions we are not free; if free, we 
act contrary to his previsions, then He is 
not. all-powerful. St. Thomas makes answer 
thus: "There is not prevision, there is vision, 
because we are in time whereas God is in 
eternity. He sees at one glance and instan- 
taneously all the past, present, and future. 
Therefore, He does not foresee but see, and 
this vision does not hinder human freedom 
any more than being seen acting prevents one 
from acting. Because God knows our deeds 
after they are done, no one can plead that 
that prevents our full liberty to do them; if 
He knew them before it is the same as know- 
ing them after, because for Him past, present, 
and future are all the same moment. " This 
appears subtle but is not, for it only amounts 
to the statement that in speaking of God time 
must not be mentioned, for God is as much 
outside time as outside space. 
The Moral System of St. Thomas.— The 



The Thirteenth Century 105 

very detailed and circumstantial moral sys- 
tem of St. Thomas may thus be summarized : 
there is in conscience, first, an intellectual 
act which is the distinction between good and 
evil ; secondly, an act of will which leads us to 
the good. This power for good urges the 
practice of virtue. There are human virtues, 
well known to the ancient philosophers, 
temperance, courage, wisdom, justice, which 
lead to happiness on earth; there are divine 
virtues, inspired in man by God, which are 
faith, hope, and charity, and they lead to 
eternal happiness. We practise the virtues, 
when we are well-disposed, because we are 
free; but our liberty and our will do not 
suffice; it is necessary for God to help us, 
and that is "grace." 

Faith and Reason. — On the question of 
the relation of reason to faith, St. Thomas 
Aquinas recognizes, or rather proclaims, 
that reason will never demonstrate faith, 
that the revealed truths, the Trinity, original 
sin, grace, etc., are above reason and in- 
finitely exceed it. How, then, can one be- 



106 Initiation into Philosophy 

lieve? By will, aided by the grace of God. 
Then henceforth must no appeal be made 
to reason? Yes, indeed! Reason serves to 
refute the errors of the adversaries of the 
faith, and by this refutation to confirm itself 
in belief. The famous Credo ut intelligam — 
I believe in order to understand — is therefore 
true. Comprehension is only possible on 
condition of belief; but subsequently com- 
prehension helps to believe, if not more, at 
least with a greater precision and in a more 
abundant light. St. Thomas Aquinas here 
is in exactly the position which Pascal seems 
to have taken up: Believe and you will 
understand ; understand and you will believe 
more exactly. Therefore an act of will: "I 
wish to believe" — a grace of God fortifying 
this will : faith exists — studies and reasoning : 
faith is the clearer. 

St. Bonaventura; Raymond Lulle. — 
Beside these men of the highest brain-power 
there are found in the thirteenth century 
mystics, that is, poets and eccentrics, both 
by the way most interesting. It was St. 



The Thirteenth Century 107 

Bonaventura who, being persuaded, almost 
like an Alexandrine, that one rises to God by 
synthetic feeling and not by series of argu- 
ments, and that one journeys towards Him 
by successive states of the soul each more 
pure and more passionate — wrote The Jour- 
ney of the Soul to God, which is, so to speak, 
a manual of mysticism. Learned as he was, 
whilst pursuing his own purpose, he digressed 
in agreeable and instructive fashion into the 
realms of real knowledge. 

Widely different from him, Raymond 
Lulle or de Lulle, an unbridled schoolman, 
in his Ars magna invented a reasoning 
machine, analogous to an arithmetical 
machine, in which ideas were automatically 
deduced from one another as the figures 
inscribe themselves on a counter. As often 
happens, the excess of the method was its 
own criticism, and an enemy of scholastic- 
ism could not have more ingeniously demon- 
strated that it was a kind of mechanism. 
Raymond de Lulle was at once a learned 
man and a well-informed and most enquiring 



io8 Initiation into Philosophy 

naturalist for whom Arabian science held no 
secrets. With that he was poet, troubadour, 
orator, as well as very eccentric and attrac- 
tive. He was beloved and persecuted in 
his lifetime, and long after his death still 
found enthusiastic disciples. 

Bacon. — Contemporaneously lived the 
man whom it is generally the custom to 
regard as the distant precursor of experi- 
mental science, Roger Bacon (who must not 
be confused with Francis Bacon, another 
learned man who lived much nearer to our 
own time). Roger Bacon, a Franciscan 
friar, occupied himself almost exclusively 
with physical and natural science. He 
passed the greater portion of his life in pris- 
on by reason of alleged sorcery and, more es- 
pecially, perhaps, because he had denounced 
the evil lives of his brethren. He had at 
least a presentiment of almost all modern 
inventions: gunpowder, magnifying glass, 
telescope, air-pump; he was distinctly an 
inventor in optics. In philosophy, properly 
speaking, he denounced what was hollow 



The Thirteenth Century 109 

and empty in scholasticism, detesting that 
preference should be given to "the straw of 
words rather than to the grain of fact," and 
proclaiming that reasoning "is good to con- 
clude but not to establish." Without dis- 
covering the law of progress, as has too 
often been alleged, he arrived at the con- 
clusion that antiquity being the youth of 
the world, the moderns are the adults, which 
only meant that it would be at our school 
that the ancients would learn were they 
to return to earth and that we ought not 
to believe blindly in the ancients; and this 
was an insurrection against the principle of 
authority and against the idolatry of Aris- 
totle. He preached the direct study of 
nature, observation, and experiment with 
the subsequent application of deduction, 
and especially of mathematical deduction, to 
experiment and observation. With all that, 
he believed in astrology; for those who are 
in advance of their time none the less belong 
to it : but he was a very great man. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES 

Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the Coming 
Era. Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery 

Decadence of Scholasticism. — The four- 
teenth century dated the decadence of 
scholasticism, but saw little new. "Real- 
ism" was generally abandoned, and the 
field was swept by "nominalism, " which was 
the theory that ideas only have existence 
in the brains which conceive them. Thus 
Durand de Saint-Pourcain remains famous 
for having said, "To exist is to be individu- 
ally," which at that epoch was very auda- 
cious. William of Ockham repeated the 
phrase with emphasis; there is nothing real 
except the individual. That went so far as 
to cast suspicion on all metaphysics, and 
somewhat on theology. In fact, although a 
no 



The 14th and 15th Centuries 11 1 

devout believer, Ockham rejected theology, 
implored the Church not to be learned, 
because her science proved nothing, and to 
content herself with faith: "Science belongs 
to God, faith to men." But, or rather in 
addition, if the ministers of God were no 
longer imposing because of their ambitious 
science, it was necessary for them to regain 
their sway over souls by other and better 
means. It was incumbent on them to be 
saintly, to revert to the purity, the simpli- 
city, and the divine childishness of the 
primitive Church; and here he was virtually 
a forerunner of the Reformation. 

Ockham was indeed one of the auxiliaries 
of Philip the Fair in his struggle with the 
Holy See, suffered excommunication, and 
sought refuge with the Duke of Bavaria, the 
foe of the Pope. 

Buridan: the Liberty of Indifference. — 
Realists and nominalists continued their 
mutual strife, sometimes physically even, 
until the middle of the fifteenth century. 
But nominalism always gained ground, hav- 



ii2 Initiation into Philosophy 

ing among other celebrated champions, Peter 
d'Ailly and Buridan; the one succeeded in 
becoming Chancellor of the University of 
Paris, the other in becoming its Rector. 
Buridan has remained famous through his 
death and his donkey, both alike legendary. 
According to a ballad by Villon, Buridan 
having been too tenderly loved by Joan of 
Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, was by his 
order "thrown in a sack into the Seine." 
By comparison of dates, the fact seems 
impossible. According to tradition, either 
in order to show the freedom of indifference, 
or that animals are mere machines, Buridan 
declared that an ass with two baskets full of 
corn placed one on each side of him and at 
equal distance from him, would never decide 
from which he should feed and would die of 
starvation. Nothing of the kind is to be 
found in his works, but he may have said 
so in a lecture and his pupils remembering it 
have handed it down as a proverb. 

Peter d'Ailly; Gerson. — Peter d'Ailly, a 
highly important ecclesiastic, head of the 



The 14th and 15th Centuries 113 

College of Navarre, chevalier of the Uni- 
versity of Paris, Cardinal, a leader in the 
discussions at the Councils at Pisa and Con- 
stance, a drastic reformer of the morals and 
customs of the Church, did not evince any- 
marked originality as a philosopher, but main- 
tained the already known doctrines of nom- 
inalism with extraordinary dialectical skill. 

Among his pupils he numbered Gerson, 
who was also Chancellor of the University 
of Paris, another highly zealous and energetic 
reformer, a more avowed enemy of scholastic- 
ism and mysticism, of exaggerated austerity 
and astrology, eminently modern in the best 
sense of the word, whose political and reli- 
gious enemies are his title of respect. He 
was the author of many small books devoted 
to the popularization of science, religion, 
and morality. To him was long attributed 
the Imitation of Jesus Christ, which on the 
whole bears no resemblance to his writings, 
but which he might very well have written 
in old age in his retreat in the peaceful 
silence of the Celestines of Lyons. 

8 



ii4 Initiation into Philosophy 

The Kabbala. — From the beginning of 
the fifteenth century the Renaissance was 
heralded by a revival of Platonism, both in 
philosophy and literature. But it was a Pla- 
tonism strangely understood, a quaint medley 
of Pythagoreanism and Alexandrinism, the 
source of which is not very clear (the period 
not having been much studied). Then arose 
an incredible infatuation for the Kabbala — 
a doctrine which was for a long while the 
secret of the Jews, brooded over by them 
so to speak during the darkness of the Middle 
Ages, in which are to be found traces of the 
most sublime speculations and of the basest 
superstitions of antiquity. It contained a 
kind of pantheistic theology closely analogous 
to those of Porphyry and Iamblichus, as well 
as processes of magic mingled with astrology. 
The Kabbalists believe that the sage, who by 
his astrological knowledge is brought into 
relation with the celestial powers, can affect 
nature, alter the course of phenomena, and 
work miracles. The Kabbala forms part of 
the history of the marvellous and of occult 



The 14th and 15th Centuries 115 

science rather than of the history of philo- 
sophy. Nevertheless men of real learning 
were initiated and were infatuated, among 
them the marvellous Pico della Mirandola, 
Reuchlin, not less remarkable as humanist 
and Hebraist, who would have run grave risk 
at the hands of the Inquisition at Cologne 
if he had not been saved by Leo X. Cardan, 
a mathematician and physician, was one of 
the learned men of the day most impregnated 
with Kabbalism. He believed in a kind of 
infallibility of the inner sense, of the intui- 
tion, and regarded as futile all sciences that 
proceeded by slow rational operations. He 
believed himself a mage and magician. 
From vanity he spoke of himself in the 
highest terms and from cynicism in the 
lowest. Doubt has been cast on his sincerity 
and also on his sanity. 

Magic. — There were also Paracelsus and 
Agrippa. Paracelsus, like Cardan, believed 
in an intense light infinitely superior to 
bestial reasoning and calls to mind certain 
philosophy of intuition of the present day. 



n6 Initiation into Philosophy 

He too believed himself a magician and 
physician, and effected cures by the appli- 
cation of astrology to therapeutics. Agrippa 
did the same with yet stranger phantasies, 
passing from absolute scepticism through 
mysticism to magi and demonology; in his 
own time and in subsequent centuries enjoy- 
ing the reputation of a devil incarnate as 
man. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 

It Is Fairly Accurate to Consider that from the Point of 

View of Philosophy, the Middle Ages Lasted until 

Descartes 

Free-thinkers More or Less Disguised 

Partisans of Reason Apart from Faith, of Observation, and 

Of Experiment 

The Freedom of Philosophy : Pomponazzo. 

— The freedom and even the audacity of 
philosophy rapidly increased. Learned and 
convinced Aristotelians were bent, either 
from sheer love of truth or from a more secret 
purpose, on demonstrating to what extent 
Aristotle, accurately read, was opposed to the 
teaching of the Church. For instance, Pom- 
ponazzo revealed that nothing could be 
drawn from Aristotle in favour of the immor- 
tality of the soul, in which he himself believed 
fervently, but in which Aristotle did not 
believe, hence it was necessary to choose 
in 



n8 Initiation into Philosophy 

between the Church and Aristotle; that 
without the immortality of the soul there 
could be no rewards beyond the grave, which 
was entirely his own opinion, but whoever 
should desire to offer excuses for Aristotle 
could say it was precisely the existence 
of punishments and rewards which deprived 
virtue of existence, which did away with 
virtue, since the good that is done for the sake 
of reward or from fear of punishment is no 
longer good ; that, still according to Aristotle, 
there could never be miracles ; that he, Pom- 
ponazzo, believed in all the miracles recorded 
in the Scriptures; but that Aristotle would 
not have believed in them, and could not 
have believed in them, a fact which demanded 
consideration, not assuredly in order to reject 
belief in miracles, but in order not to bestow 
on Aristotle that confidence which for so long 
had been too readily placed in him. 

In the same way, he took up again the 
eternal question of the prescience of God and 
of human liberty, and showed that no matter 
what had been said it was necessary to 



The Sixteenth Century 119 

choose: either we are free and God is not 
omnipotent, or God is omnipotent and we 
are not free. To regard as true this latter 
hypothesis, towards which the philosopher 
evidently leans, would cause God to be the 
author of evil and of sin. It would not be 
impossible for God to be the author of evil 
as an essential condition of good, for if evil 
were not to exist then there could not be 
good; nor would it be impossible that He 
should be the author, not of sin, but of the 
possibility of sin in order that virtue might 
be possible, there being no virtue where it is 
impossible to commit sin; but therein lies a 
mystery which faith alone can solve, and 
which Aristotle at any rate has not solved, 
therefore let us not place reliance on Aristotle. 

This disguised freethinker, for he does not 
appear to me to be anything else, was one 
of the most original thinkers of the period 
intermediate between the Middle Ages and 
Descartes. 

Michael Servetus; Vanini. — Such in- 
stances of temerity were sometimes fatal to 



120 Initiation into Philosophy 

their authors. Michael Servetus, a very 
learned Spanish physician who perhaps dis- 
covered the circulation of the blood before 
Harvey, disbelieved in the Trinity and in 
the divinity of Jesus, and, as he was a Platon- 
ist, perceived no intermediaries between 
God and man save ideas. Persecuted by 
the Catholics, he sought refuge at Geneva, 
believing Calvin to be more merciful than 
the Inquisitors, and Calvin burned him alive. 

Vanini, half a century later, that is at the 
commencement of the seventeenth, a rest- 
less, vain, and insolent man, after a life full 
of sudden changes of fortune, and yet dis- 
tinguished, was burnt alive at Toulouse for 
certain passages in his De admirandis . . . 
arcanis, and for having said that he would 
not express his opinion on the immortality 
of the soul until he was old, a Jew, and a 
German. 

Bruno; Campanella. — Giordano Bruno, an 
astronomer and one of the first to affirm that 
the sun was the centre of the world, professed, 
despite certain precautions, a doctrine which 



The Sixteenth Century 121 

confused God with the world and denied or 
excluded creation. Giordano Bruno was 
arrested at Venice in 1593, kept seven years 
in prison, and finally burnt at Rome in 1600. 
Campanella, likewise an Italian, who spent 
twenty-seven years in a dungeon for hav- 
ing conspired against the Spanish masters of 
his country, and who died in exile in Paris 
in 1639, was a sceptic in philosophy, or 
rather an anti-metaphysician, and, as would 
be said nowadays, a positivist. There are 
only two sources of knowledge, observation 
and reasoning. Observation makes us know 
things — is this true? May not the sen- 
sations of things which we have be a simple 
phantasmagoria? No; for we have an inter- 
nal sense, a sense of our own, which cannot 
deceive us, which affirms our existence (here 
is the Cogito of Descartes anticipated) and 
which, at the same time, affirms that there 
are things which are not ourselves, so that 
coincidently the ego and the non-ego are 
established. Yes, but is this non-ego really 
what it seems? It is; granted; but what is 



122 Initiation into Philosophy 

it and can we know what it is? Not without 
doubt, and here scepticism is unshakable; 
but in that there is certitude of the existence 
of the non-ego, the presumption is that we 
can know it, partially, relatively, very 
relatively, while we remain infinitely distant 
from an absolute knowledge, which would be 
divine. Therefore let us observe and experi- 
ment; let us make the "history" of nature 
as historians make the history of the human 
race. And this is the simple and solid philo- 
sophy of experiment. 

But Campanella, like so many more, was 
a metaphysician possessed by the devil of 
metaphysics, and after having imperiously 
recommended the writing of only the history 
of nature, he himself wrote its romance as 
well. Every being, he said (and the thought 
was a very fine one), exists on condition of 
being able to exist, and on condition that 
there be an idea of which it is the realization, 
and again on condition that nature is willing 
to create it. In other words, nature can, 
knows what she wishes, and wishes. Now 



The Sixteenth Century 123 

all beings, in a greater or less degree according 
to their perfection or imperfection, feel this 
triple condition of being able, knowing, and 
wishing. Every being can, knows, and wishes, 
even inorganic matter (here already is the 
world as will and representation of Schopen- 
hauer), and God is only absolute power, 
absolute knowledge, and absolute will. This 
is why all creative things gravitate to God 
and desire to return to Him as to their origin, 
and as the perfection of what they are: the 
universe has nostalgia for God. 

Campanella was also, as we should say 
nowadays, a sociologist. He made his 
"Republic" as Plato had made his. The 
Republic of Campanella was called the 
City of the Sun. It was a community 
republic, leavened with aristocracy with 
"spiritual power" and "temporal power" 
somewhat after the manner of Auguste 
Comte. Campanella was a great sower of 
ideas. 

Francis Bacon. — Francis Bacon, lawyer, 
member of Parliament, Lord Chancellor of 



124 Initiation into Philosophy 

England, personal friend of James I, friend, 
protector, and perhaps collaborator with 
Shakespeare, overthrown as the result of 
political animosity and relegated to private 
life, was a very learned man with a marvellous 
mind. Like his namesake, Roger Bacon, but 
in an age more favourable to intellectual 
reform, he attempted a sort of renewal of the 
human mind {Instauratio Magna) or at least a 
radical revolution in the methods and work- 
ings of the human mind. Although Francis 
Bacon professed admiration for many of the 
thinkers of antiquity, he urged that it was 
wrong to rely on them because they had not 
sufficiently observed; one must not, like the 
schoolmen, have ideas a priori, which are 
"idols, " and there are idols of tribe, of party, 
of school, of eras; intentions must not be 
perceived everywhere in nature, and we must 
not, because the sun warms, believe it was 
created to warm, or because the earth yields 
nourishment believe her creation was for the 
purpose of feeding us, and that all things 
converge to man and are put at his service. 



The Sixteenth Century 125 

It is necessary to proceed by observation, by 
experiment, and then by induction, but with 
prodigious mistrust of induction. Induction 
consists in drawing conclusions from the 
particular to the general, from a certain 
number of facts to a law. This is legitimate 
on condition that the conclusion is not 
drawn from a few facts to a law, which is pre- 
cipitate induction, fruitful in errors; but 
from a very large number of facts to a law, 
which even then is considered as provisional. 
As for metaphysics, as for the investigation 
of universal law, that should be entirely 
separated from philosophy itself, from the 
"primary philosophy" which does not lead 
to it; it has its own field, which is that of 
faith: "Give to faith what belongeth to 
faith." In the main he is uninterested in 
metaphysics, believing them always to re- 
volve in a circle and, I do not say, only 
believes in science and in method, but has 
hope only from knowledge and method, an 
enthusiast in this respect just as another 
might be about the supersensible world or 



126 Initiation into Philosophy 

about ideas, saying human knowledge and 
human power are really coincident, and 
believing that knowledge will support hu- 
manity in all calamities, will prolong human 
life, will establish a new golden age, etc. 

Moreover, let there be none of that eternal 
and unfounded fear that knowledge will 
cause the disappearance of the religious feel- 
ing. With profound conviction and judging 
by himself, Bacon said: "A little philosophy 
inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth 
in philosophy bringeth a man's mind about to 
religion." Such is true philosophy, "subordi- 
nate to the object," attentive to the object, 
listening to the voices of the world and only 
anxious to translate them into human lan- 
guage : ' ' that is true philosophy which renders 
the voices of the world the most accurately 
possible, like an echo, which writes as if at the 
dictation of the world itself, adding nothing 
of its own, only repeating and resounding." 

And, as a man is always of his time, he 
believed in alchemy and in the possibility of 
transmuting base metals into gold. But 



The Sixteenth Century 127 

note how he understood it: "To create a new 
nature in a given body or to produce new 
natures and to introduce them ... he who 
is acquainted with the forms and modes of 
superinducing yellowness, weight, ductility, 
fixity, fluidity, solution, and the rest, with 
their gradations and methods, will see and 
take care that these properties be united in 
some body, whence its transformation into 
gold may follow." Modern chemistry, with 
scientific methods highly analogous to those 
which Bacon indicated or foresaw, has not 
made gold, which is not a very useful thing 
to do, but has done better. 

Thomas Hobbes. — At the end of the six- 
teenth century, another Englishman, Thomas 
Hobbes, began to think. He was, above all 
else, a literary man and a sociologist; he 
translated Thucydides and Homer, he wrote 
Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a 
Commonwealth, which is a manual of des- 
potism, demonstrating that all men in a na- 
tural state were beasts of prey with regard 
to one another, but that they escaped this 



128 Initiation into Philosophy 

unpleasant fate by submission to a prince 
who has all rights because he is perpetually 
saving his subjects from death, and who can 
therefore impose on them whatever he 
pleases, even scientific dogma or religious 
beliefs. Merely regarded as a philosopher, 
properly so called, Hobbes has an important 
position in the history of ideas. Like Francis 
Bacon, but more rigorously and authorita- 
tively, he began by separating metaphysics 
and theology from philosophy. Philosophy is 
the art of thinking. That which is not sensi- 
ble — mind, soul, God — cannot be thought: 
can only be believed; philosophy does not 
deny all that; merely it does not concern 
itself therewith. Here is the whole of posi- 
tivism established in principle. What we 
can think is what we feel. Things are known 
to us only through sensations; a thought is 
a sensation, the human mind is a compound 
of sensations. 

No; for I can think of a thing without 
hearing, seeing, feeling it, etc. 

This is because we have memory, which is 



The Sixteenth Century 129 

itself a sensation; it is a sensation which 
prolongs itself; to remember is to feel that 
one has felt; it is to feel a former sensation 
which the brain is able to preserve. We 
think only by combining current sensations 
with other current sensations, or much more 
often indeed, thanks to memory, by combin- 
ing current sensations with older ones, or 
former sensations with each other. This is 
but a fragile basis for knowledge and thought, 
for sensation is only a modification of our- 
selves caused by an external object, and 
consequently gives us nothing at all of the 
external object, and of itself the external world 
is eternally unknown to us; but we combine 
with each other the illusions that the external 
world deposits in us through the delusive or 
doubtful intermediary of our senses. 

When the sensation thus combined with 
other sensations has become thought, then 
ideas begin to exist. They are products of 
sensation detached from sensation. They 
are interassociated by laws that are obscure, 
yet which can be vaguely perceived. They 



130 Initiation into Philosophy 

awake, so to speak, and call to one another; 
every time an idea previously acquired 
reappears, it is followed by the thought which 
accompanied it when it was acquired. In 
a conversation a traitor is spoken of. Some- 
one asks what was the value of a piece of 
silver in ancient times. This appears inco- 
herent; really it is a natural and simple 
association of ideas in which there are few 
intermediate steps. The person who listened 
as the traitor was mentioned thought of 
Judas, who was the first traitor of whom he 
had heard, and of the thirty pieces of silver, 
the price of the betrayal by Judas. The 
association of ideas is more or less close, more 
or less loose; it is disconnected in dreams, 
irregular in musing, close directly it is domi- 
nated and in consequence directed by an 
end pursued, by a goal sought; for then 
there is a desire to attain which associates 
nothing of itself, but which, eliminating all 
ideas that are not pertinent to the end pur- 
sued, permits only the association of those 
which have relation to it. 



The Sixteenth Century 131 

Seeing in the human soul only successive 
impulses arising from those first impulses 
which are the sensations, Hobbes does not 
believe we are free to do what we wish; we 
are carried away by the strongest impulse 
of our internal impulses, desire, fear, aversion, 
love, etc. Nevertheless we deliberate, we 
consider different courses to pursue and we 
decide on the one we desire to choose. No; 
we do not deliberate, we only imagine we 
deliberate. Deliberation is only a succession 
of different feelings, and to the one that gains 
the day we give the name of volition. "In 
the [so-called] deliberation, the final desire 
or the final fear is called will." Therefore 
liberty has no more existence among men 
than among animals ; will and desire are only 
one and the same thing considered under 
different aspects. 

Utilitarian Morality. — Henceforth there is 
no morality; without the power to will this 
and not to will that, there is no possible 
morality. Hobbes retorts with "utilitarian 
morality " : What man should seek is pleasure, 



132 Initiation into Philosophy 

as Aristippus thought; but true pleasure — 
that which is permanent and that which is 
useful to him. Now it is useful to be a good 
citizen, a loyal subject, sociable, serviceable 
to others, careful to obtain their esteem by- 
good conduct, etc. Morality is interest 
rightly understood, and interest rightly 
understood is absolutely blended with the 
morality of duty. The criminal is not a 
criminal but an idiot; the honest man is not 
an honest man but an intelligent one. Ob- 
serve that a man is hardly convinced when 
preached to in the name of duty, but always 
convinced when addressed in the name of his 
own interest. 

All this is fairly sensible; but from the 
time that freedom ceases there can be no 
morality, not even utilitarian; for it is useless 
even from the point of view of his own 
interests, to preach to a man who is only a 
machine moved by the strongest force; and, 
if he be only that, to lay down a moral code 
for him either from the point of view of his 
own interests, or from that of morality, or 



The Sixteenth Century 133 

from that of the love of God are things which 
are the same and which are as absurd the 
one as the other. All philosophy, which 
does not believe in human liberty, yet which 
enunciates a system of morality, is in per- 
petual contradiction. 



Part III 
MODERN TIMES 



135 



CHAPTER I 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 

Descartes. Cartesianism 

Descartes. — The seventeenth century, 
which was the greatest philosophic century 
of modern times and perhaps of any time, 
began with Rene Descartes. Descartes, born 
at La Haye in Touraine in 1596, of noble 
family (his real name was des Quartes), 
was educated by the Jesuits of the college of 
La Fleche, followed the military profession 
for several years, then gave himself up to 
mathematics and became one of the greatest 
mathematicians of Europe, travelled all over 
Europe for his own amusement and instruc- 
tion, wrote scientific and philosophical works, 
of which the most famous are the Discourse 
on Method, the Meditations, and the Rules 
for the Control of the Mind, resided sometimes 
137 



138 Initiation into Philosophy 

in Paris, sometimes in Holland, and finally, 
at fifty-four years of age, unhappily attracted 
by the flattering invitationsof Queen Christina 
of Sweden, proceeded to Stockholm, where he 
succumbed in four months to the severity of 
the climate. He died in February, 1650. 

The System of Descartes. — In the works 
of Descartes there are a general system of 
philosophy, a psychology, and a method. 
This order is here adopted because of the 
three, in Descartes; it is the third which is 
the most important, and which has left the 
most profound traces. The foundation of 
the sytem of Descartes is belief in God and 
in the goodness of God. I say the founda- 
tion and not the starting-point. The 
starting-point is another matter; but it will 
be clearly seen that the foundation is what 
has just been stated. The starting-point 
is this : I do not believe, provisionally, in any- 
thing, not wishing to take into account what 
I have been taught. I doubt everything. 
Is there anything I cannot doubt? It seems 
to me there is : I cannot doubt that I doubt. 



The Seventeenth Century 139 

Now if I doubt, I think; if I think, I am. 
There is one certainty, I am. 

And having arrived there, Descartes is at 
a dead stop, for from the certitude of one's 
own existence nothing can be deduced save 
the certitude of one's existence. For in- 
stance, shall I believe in the existence of 
everything that is not myself? There is no 
reason why I should believe in it. The 
world may be a dream. But if I believe in 
God and in a God of perfect goodness, I can 
then believe in something outside of myself, 
for God not being able to deceive Himself or 
me, if He permits me to see the external 
world, it is because this external world exists. 
There are already, therefore, three things in 
which I believe: my own existence, that of 
God, and that of the universe. Which of 
these beliefs is the fundamental one? Evi- 
dently, the one not demonstrated; the axiom 
is that upon which one rests to demonstrate 
everything except itself. Now of the three 
things in which Descartes believed, his own 
existence is demonstrated by the impossi- 



140 Initiation into Philosophy 

bility of thinking or feeling, without feeling 
his own existence; the other is demonstrated 
by the existence of a good God ; the existence 
of a good God is demonstrated by nothing. 
It is believed. Hence belief in a good God 
is Descartes' foundation. This has not been 
introduced in order that he may escape from 
the I am at which he came to a stop ; that be- 
lief certainly existed previously, and if he had 
recourse to it, it was because it existed first. 
Without that, he had too much intellectual 
honesty to invent it for a particular need. 
He had it, and he found it as it were in 
reserve when he asked himself if he could go 
beyond i" am. Here was his foundation; 
all the rest would complete the proof. 

The Existence of God. — Although Des- 
cartes rests on God as being his first principle, 
he does not fail to prove His existence, and 
that is begging the question, something 
proved by what has to be proved. For if 
Descartes believed only in something outside 
himself because of a good God, that Being 
outside himself, God, he can prove only 



The Seventeenth Century 141 

because of the existence of a good God, who 
cannot deceive us, and thus is God proved 
by the belief in Him. That is begging the 
question. Descartes does not fail to prove 
the existence of God by superabundance as it 
were; and this, too, in itself indicates clearly 
that faith in God is the very foundation of 
the philosophy of Descartes. After having 
taken it as the basis of reasoning, he takes it 
as the goal of reasoning, which indicates that 
the idea of God, so to speak, encircled his 
mind and that he found it at every ultimate 
point of thought. 

He proves it, therefore, first by an argu- 
ment analogous to that of St. Anselm, which 
is this: we, imperfect and finite, have the 
idea of a perfect and infinite Being; we are 
not capable of this idea. Therefore it must 
have come to us from a Being really perfect 
and infinite, and hence this perfect Being 
exists. 

Another proof, that of God regarded as 
cause. First : I exist. Who made me? Was 
it myself? No, if it had been myself I should 



142 Initiation into Philosophy 

have endowed myself with all the perfections 
of which I can conceive and in which I am sin- 
gularly deficient. Therefore it must be some 
other being who created me. It was my 
parents. No doubt, but who created my 
parents and the parents of my parents? One 
cannot go back indefinitely from cause to 
cause, and there must have been a first one. 

Secondly: even my own actual existence, 
my existence at this very moment, is it the 
result of my existence yesterday? Nothing 
proves it, and there is no necessity be- 
cause I existed just now that I should 
exist at present. There must therefore 
be a cause at each moment and a continuous 
cause. That continuous cause is God, and 
the whole world is a creation perpetually 
continued, and is only comprehensible as 
continuous creation and is only explicable 
by a Creator. 

The World. — Thus sure of himself, of God, 
and of the world, Descartes studies the 
world and himself. In the world he sees 
souls and matter; matter is substance in 



The Seventeenth Century 143 

extensions, souls are substance not in exten- 
sion, spiritual substance. The extended sub- 
stance is endowed with impulse. Is the 
impulse self -generated, are the bodies self- 
impelled? No, they are moved. What is 
the primary motive force? It is God. Souls 
are substances without extension and motive 
forces. In this respect they are analogous 
to God. They are united to bodies and act 
on them. How? This is an impenetrable 
mystery, but they are closely and substan- 
tially united to the bodies, which is proved by 
physical pains depressing the soul and moral 
sufferings depressing the body; and they act 
on them, not by creating movements, for 
the quantity of movements is always the 
same, but by directing the movements after 
this fashion or that. Souls being spiritual, 
there is no reason for their disaggregation, 
that is, their demise, and in fact they do not 
die. 

It is for this reason that Descartes lays 
such stress on animals not having souls. 
If they had souls, the souls would be spiritual, 



144 Initiation into Philosophy 

they would not be susceptible to disaggre- 
gation and would be immortal. "Save 
atheism, there is no doctrine more danger- 
ous and detestable than that," but animals 
are soulless and purely mechanism; Des- 
cartes exerts himself to prove this in great 
detail, and he thus escapes avowing the 
immortality of the souls of animals, which 
is repugnant to him, or by allowing that 
they perish with the bodies to be exposed to 
the objection: "Will it not be the same with 
the souls of men?" 

The Freedom of the Soul. — The human 
soul is endowed with freedom to do good or 
evil. What proof is there of this freedom? 
First, the inward feeling that we have. 
Every evident idea is true. Now, not only 
have we the idea of this freedom, but it 
would be impossible for us not to have it. 
Freedom "is known without proofs, merely 
by the experience we have of it." It is by 
the feeling of our freedom, of our free-will 
that we understand that we exist as a being, 
as a thing which is not merely a thing. 



The Seventeenth Century 145 

The true ego is the will. Even more than 
an intelligent being, man is a free individ- 
ual, and only feels himself to be a man 
when feeling himself free, so that he might 
not believe himself to be intelligent, nor 
think himself sensible, etc., but not to think 
himself free would for him be moral suicide; 
and in fact he actually never does anything 
which he does not believe himself to be free 
to do — that is, which he does not believe that 
he might avoid doing, if he so wished. Those 
who say, "It is simply the feeling that it is 
better for ourselves which tends to make us 
do this instead of doing that," are deeply 
in error. They forget that we often prefer 
the worst for ourselves in order to prove to 
ourselves that we are free and therefore have 
no other motive power than our own freedom. 
(And this is exactly what contemporaneous 
philosophy has thus formulated: "Will is 
neither determinate nor indeterminate, it is 
determinative.") "Even when a very ob- 
vious reason leads us to a thing, although 
morally speaking it is difficult for us to do the 
10 



146 Initiation into Philosophy 

opposite, nevertheless, speaking absolutely, 
we can, for we are always free to prevent our- 
selves from pursuing a good thing clearly 
known . . . provided only that we think it is 
beneficial thereby to give evidence of the truth of 
our free-will.'" It is the pure and simple 
wish to be free which creates an action; it 
is the all-powerful liberty. 

As has been happily observed, in relation 
to the universe the philosophy of Descartes 
is a mechanical philosophy; in relation to 
man the philosophy of Descartes is a philo- 
sophy of will. As has also been remarked, 
there are very striking analogies between 
Corneille and Descartes from the point of 
view of the apotheosis of the will, and the 
Meditations having appeared after the great 
works of Corneille, it is not so much that 
Corneille was a Cartesian, as that Descartes 
was a follower of Corneille. 

Psychology of Descartes. — Descartes has 
almost written a psychology, what with his 
Treatise on the Passions and his letters and, 
besides, certain passages in his Meditations. 



The Seventeenth Century 147 

The soul thinks and has passions. There 
are three kinds of ideas, the factitious, the 
adventitious, and the innate; the factitious 
ideas are those which the imagination forms ; 
the adventitious ideas are those suggested by 
the external world through the intermediary 
of the senses; the innate ideas are those 
constituting the mind itself, the conditions 
under which it thinks and apart from which 
it cannot think : we cannot conceive an object 
not extended, nor an object apart from time, 
nor anything without a cause; the ideas of 
time, space, and cause are innate ideas; we 
cannot conceive ourselves as other than free ; 
the idea of liberty is an innate idea. 

The soul has passions; it is therein that, 
without dependence on the body, it has 
intimate relations with and is modified by it, 
not radically, but in its daily life. There 
are operations of the soul which cannot 
strictly be termed passions, and yet which are 
directed or at least influenced by the body. 
Memory is passive, and consequently mem- 
ory is a species of passion. The lively sen- 



148 Initiation into Philosophy 

sations which the body transmits to the 
brain leave impressions (Malebranche would 
say "traces"), and according to these im- 
pressions the soul is moved a second or a 
third time, and that is what is called me- 
mory. "The impressions of the brain render 
it suitable to stir the soul in the same way 
as it has been stirred before, and also to make 
it recollect something, just as the folds in a 
piece of paper or linen make it more suitable 
to be folded anew as it was before than if 
it had never been thus folded." Similarly, 
the association of ideas is passive, and in 
consequence is a kind of passion. The 
association of ideas is the fact that thought 
passes along the same path it has already 
traversed, and follows in its labyrinth the 
thread which interlinks its thoughts, and 
this thread is the traces which thoughts have 
left in the brain. In abandoning ourselves 
to the association of ideas, we are passive and 
we yield ourselves freely to a passion. That 
is so true that current speech itself recognizes 
this : musing is a passion, it is possible to have 



The Seventeenth Century 149 

a passion for musing, and musing is nothing 
else than the association of ideas in which 
the will does not intervene. 

The Passions. — Coming to the passions 
strictly speaking, there are some which are 
of the soul and only of the soul; the passion 
for God is a passion of the soul, the passion 
for liberty is a passion of the soul; but there 
are many more which are the effects of the 
union of the soul with the body. These 
passions are excited in the soul by a state of 
the body or a movement of the body or of 
some part of the body; they are "emotions" 
of the soul corresponding to "movements" 
of the machine. All passions have relation 
to the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain, 
and according as they relate to the former or 
the latter are they expansive or oppressive. 
There are six principal passions, of which all 
the rest are only modifications: admiration, 
love, desire, joy, having relation to the ap- 
petite of happiness; hatred, sadness, having 
relation to the fear of pain. "All the pas- 
sions are good and may become bad" (Des- 



150 Initiation into Philosophy 

cartes in this deviates emphatically from 
Stoicism for which the passions are simply 
maladies of the soul). All passions are good 
in themselves. They are destined (this is a 
remarkable theory) to cause the duration of 
thoughts which would otherwise pass and be 
rapidly effaced ; by reason of this, they cause 
man to act; if he were only directed by his 
thoughts, unaccompanied by his passions, he 
would never act, and if it be recognized that 
man is born for action, it will at the same 
time be recognized that it is necessary he 
should have passions. 

But, you will say, there can be good pas- 
sions (of a nature to give force to just ideas) 
and evil passions. 

No, they are all good, but all also have 
their bad side, their deviation, rather, which 
enables them to become bad. Therefore, in 
each passion no matter what it be, it is always 
possible to distinguish between the passion 
itself, which is always good, and the excess, 
the deviation, the degradation or corruption 
of this passion which constitutes, if it be 



The Seventeenth Century 151 

desired to call it so, an evil passion, and this 
is what Descartes demonstrates, passion by- 
passion, in the fullest detail, in his Treatise 
on the Passions. 

The Part of the Soul. — If it is thus, what 
will be the part of the soul (the soul is the 
will)? It will be to abandon itself to good 
passions, or more accurately to the good that 
is in all passions, and to reduce the passions 
to be "nothing more than themselves." In 
courage, for example, there is courage and 
temerity. The action of the will, enlight- 
ened by the judgment, will consist in reduc- 
ing courage to be nothing but courage. In 
fear, there is cowardice and there is the 
feeling of self-preservation which, according 
to Descartes, is the foundation of fear and 
which is a very good passion. The action of 
the soul is to reduce fear to simple prudence. 

But how will the will effect these metamor- 
phoses or at least these departures, these 
separations, these reductions to the due pro- 
portion? Directly it can effect nothing upon 
the passions; it cannot remove them; it can- 



152 Initiation into Philosophy 

not even remove the baser portions of them ; 
but it can exercise influence over them by 
the intermediary of reasoning; it can lead 
them to the attentive consideration of the 
thought that they carry with them, and by 
this consideration modify them. For in- 
stance, if it is a question of fear, the soul 
forces fear to consider that the peril is much 
less than was imagined, and thus little by 
little brings it back to simple prudence. 

Note that this method, although indirect, 
is very potent; for it ends by really trans- 
forming the passions into their opposites. 
Persuade fear that there is less peril in march- 
ing forward than in flight and that the most 
salutary flight is the flight forward and you 
have changed fear to courage. — But such an 
influence of ihe will over the passions is 
extraordinarily unlikely: it will never take 
place. — Yes, by habit! Habit too is a pas- 
sion, or, if you will, a passive state, like that 
of memory or the association of ideas, and 
there are men possessed only of that passion. 
But the will, by the means which have been 



The Seventeenth Century 153 

described, by imposing an act, a first act, 
creates a commencement of habit, by impos- 
ing a second confirms that habit, by impos- 
ing a third strengthens it, and so on. In 
plain words, the will, by reasoning with the 
passions and reasoning with them incessantly, 
brings them back to what is good in them and 
ends by bringing them back there perma- 
nently, so that it arrives at having only the 
passions it desires, or, if you prefer it, for 
it is the same thing, at having only the pas- 
sion for good. Morality consists in loving 
noble passions, as was later observed by 
Vauvenargues, and that means to love all the 
passions, each for what is good in it, that is to 
reduce each passion to what real goodness is 
inherent in it, and that is to gather all the 
passions into one, which is the passion of 
duty. 

The Method of Descartes. — As has been 
observed, not only had Descartes influence 
through all that he wrote, but it was by his 
method that he has exerted the greatest and 
most durable sway, and that is why we con- 



154 Initiation into Philosophy 



elude with the examination of his method. 
It is all contained in this: to accept nothing 
as true except what is evident; to accept as 
true all that is evident. Descartes there- 
fore made evidence the touchstone of cer- 
tainty. But mark well the profound meaning 
of this method: what is it that gives me the 
assurance of the evidence of such or such an 
idea? How shall I know that such an idea 
is really evident to me? Because I see it in 
perfect clearness? No, that does not suffice: 
the evidence may be deceptive; there can be 
false evidence; all the wrong ideas of the 
philosophers of antiquity, save when they 
were sophists, had for them the character of 
being evident. Why? Why should error 
be presented to the mind as an evident truth? 
Because in truth, in profound truthfulness, 
it must be admitted that judgment does not 
depend upon the intelligence. And on what 
does it depend? On will, on free-will. This 
is how. No doubt, error depends on our 
judgment, but our judgment depends on our 
will in the sense that it depends on us whether 



The Seventeenth Century 155 

we adhere to our judgment without it being 
sufficiently precise or do not adhere to it be- 
cause it is not sufficiently precise: "If I ab- 
stain from giving my judgment on a subject 
when I do not conceive it with sufficient 
clearness and distinction, it is evident that I 
shall not be deceived. " Evidence is therefore 
not only a matter of judgment, of understand- 
ing, of intelligence, it is a matter of energetic 
will and of freedom courageously acquired. 
We are confronted with evidence when, with a 
clear brain, we are capable, in order to accept 
Or refuse what it lays before us, of acting 
"after such a fashion," of having put our- 
selves in such a state of the soul that we feel 
"that no external force can constrain us to 
think in such or such a way." 

These external forces are authority, pre- 
judices, personal interest, or that of party. 
The faculty of perceiving evidence is there- 
fore the triumph both of sound judgment in 
itself and of a freedom of mind which, sup- 
posing probity, scrupulousness, and courage, 
and perhaps the most difficult of all courage, 



156 Initiation into Philosophy 

supposes a profound and vigorous morality. 
Evidence is given only to men who are first 
highly intelligent and next, or rather before 
all else, are profoundly honest. Evidence is 
not a consequence of morality; but morality 
is the condition of evidence. 

There is the foundation of the method of 
Descartes; add to it his advice on the art of 
reasoning, which even in his time was not at 
all novel, but which with him is very precise ; 
not to generalize too hastily, not to be put off 
with words, but to have a clear definition of 
every word, etc., and thus a sufficient idea of 
it will be obtained. 

Now first, to this method Descartes was 
unfaithful, as always happens, and often 
accepted the suggestions of his magnificent 
imagination as the evidences of his reason; 
secondly, the touchstone of evidence is 
certainly the best, but is far from being 
infallible (and Vico has ridiculed it with as 
much sense as wit) and the freest mind can 
still find false things evident; yet, thirdly, 
favouring freedom of research self-controlled, 



The Seventeenth Century 157 

individual and scornful of all authority, the 
method of Descartes has become a banner, a 
motto, and a flag for all modern philosophy. 
Descartes the Father of Modern Philo- 
sophy. — And from all that the result has 
been that all modern philosophy, with few 
exceptions, has recognised Descartes as its 
parent — that individual evidence, if it may 
be thus expressed, favouring temerity and 
each believing himself closer to the truth the 
more he differed from others, and conse- 
quently was unable to suspect himself of 
being subject to influences, individual evi- 
dence has provided a fresh opportunity for 
self-deception ; finally, that Descartes, by a not 
uncommon metamorphosis, by means of his 
system which he did not follow, has become 
the head or the venerated ancestor of doc- 
trines which he would have detested and 
which he already did detest more than all 
others. Because he said that evidence alone 
and the free investigation of evidence led to 
truth, he has become the ancestor of the 
sceptics who are persuaded that surrender 



158 Initiation into Philosophy 

must be made only to evidence and that 
evidence cannot be found ; and he has become 
the ancestor of the positivists who believe 
that evidence certainly exists somewhere, but 
not in metaphysics or in theodicy, or in 
knowledge of the soul, of immortality, and 
of God, branches of knowledge which sur- 
pass our means of knowing, which are in fact 
outside knowledge. So that this man who 
conceived more than any man, this man who 
so often constructed without a sure founda- 
tion, and this man, yet again, as has been 
aptly said, who always thought by innate 
ideas, by his formula has become the master 
and above all the guarantor of those who are 
the most reserved and most distrustful as to 
philosophic construction, innate ideas, and 
imagination. This does not in the least 
diminish his brilliant merit; it is only one 
of those changes of direction in which the 
history of ideas abounds. 



CHAPTER II 

CARTESIANS 

All the Seventeenth Century was under the Influence of 

Descartes. Port-Royal, Bossuet, Fenelon 

Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz 

Cartesian Influence. — Nearly all the 
seventeenth century was Cartesian, and in 
the general sense of the word, not only as 
supporters of the method of evidence, but as 
adherents of the general philosophy of Des- 
cartes. Gassendi (a Provencal, and not an 
Italian), professor of philosophy at Aix, 
subsequently in Paris, was not precisely a 
faithful disciple of Descartes, and he opposed 
him several times; he had leanings towards 
Epicurus and the doctrine of atoms ; he drew 
towards Hobbes, but he was also a fervent 
admirer of Bacon, and so approached Des- 
cartes, who thought very highly of him, 
i59 



i6o Initiation into Philosophy 

though impatiently galled by his criticisms. 
After the example of Epicurus he was the 
most sober and austere of men, and of the 
two it was Descartes rather than he who was. 
Epicurean in the common use of the word. 
According to a tradition, which to my mind 
rests on insufficient proof, he was an in- 
structor of Moliere. 

All the thinkers of the seventeenth cen- 
tury came more or less profoundly under the 
Cartesian influence: Pascal, Bossuet, Fene- 
lon, Arnauld, and all Port-Royal. This 
influence was to diminish only in the eigh- 
teenth century, though kept up by the 
impenitent Fontenelle, but outweighed by 
that of Locke, to reappear very vigorously in 
the nineteenth century in France in the 
school of Maine de Biran and of Cousin. 

Malebranche. — A separate niche must be 
made for the Cartesians, almost as great as 
Descartes, who filled the seventeenth century 
with their renown, — the Frenchman Male- 
branche, the Dutchman Spinoza, and the 
German Leibnitz. Pushing the theories of 



Cartesians 161 

Descartes further than Descartes would him- 
self in all probability have desired to, from 
what Descartes had said that it was only 
through God that we perceived accurately, 
Malebranche declared that it was only in 
God that we perceived accurately, and 
fundamentally this is the same idea; it can 
only be deemed that Malebranche is the more 
precise: "God alone is known by Himself 
[is believed in without uncertainty]; there is 
only He that we can see in immediate and 
direct perspective. " All the rest we see in 
Him, in His light, in the light He creates in 
our minds. When we see, it is that we are 
in Him. Evidence is divine light. He is 
the link of ideas. (And thus Malebranche 
brought Plato near to Descartes and showed 
that, without the latter being aware of it, they 
both said the same thing.) God is always 
the cause and as He is the cause of all real 
things, He is cause also of all truths, and as 
He is everywhere in real objects, He is also 
everywhere in the true ideas which we can 
have, or rather in which we can participate. 



1 62 Initiation into Philosophy 

When we seek a truth we pray without think- 
ing we do so; attention is a prayer. 

In the same way, from the saying of Des- 
cartes that the universe is a continuous 
creation, Malebranche deduced or rather 
concluded that our thoughts and actions are 
acts of God. There can be no action of the 
body on the soul to produce ideas ; that would 
be inconceivable; but on the occasion, for 
instance, of our eyes resting on an object, 
God gives us an idea of that object, whether 
in conformity or not we cannot tell; but at 
any rate He gives us that idea of the object 
which He wishes us to have. 

There is no action of our soul on our body ; 
that would be inconceivable. But God to 
our will adds a force having a tendency 
towards goodness as a rule, and to each of 
our volitions adds a force tending to its 
execution and capable of executing it. 

Then, when our will is evil and we execute 
it, does God sin in our name? 

Certainly not; because sin is not an act; 
it consists in doing nothing ; it consists pre- 



Cartesians 163 

cisely in the soul not acting on the body; 
therefore it is not a force but a weakness. 
Sin is that God has withdrawn Himself from 
us. The sinner is only a being who is 
without strength because he is lacking in 
grace. 

The principle of morality is the respect for 
order and the love of order. That makes 
two degrees, the first of which is regularity 
and the second virtue. To conform to 
order is highly rational but without merit 
(e.g., to give money to the poor from habit 
or possibly from vanity) . To love order and 
to desire that it should be greater, more 
complete, and nearer to the will of God, is to 
adhere to God, to live in God, just as to see 
rightly is to see in God. All morality, into 
the details of which we will not enter, evolves 
from the love of order. The universe is a 
vast mechanism, as was stated by Descartes, 
set in motion and directed by God — that is to 
say, by the laws established by God ; for God 
acts only by general dispositions (which are 
laws) and not by particular dispositions. 






164 Initiation into Philosophy 

In other words, there exists a will, but there 
are no volitions. 

Miracles. — But then you will say there 
are no miracles; for miracle is precisely a 
particular will traversing and interrupting 
the general will. 

To begin with, there are very few mira- 
cles, which therefore permits order to sub- 
sist; it would be only if there were incessant 
miracles that order would be non-existent. 
Next, a miracle is a warning God gives to 
men because of their weakness, to remind 
them that behind the laws there is a Law- 
giver, behind the general dispositions a 
Being who disposes. Because of their in- 
tellectual weakness, if they never saw any 
derogation from the general laws they would 
take them to be fatalities. A miracle is a 
grace intervening in things, just as grace 
properly so-called intervenes in human ac- 
tions. And it is not contradictory to the 
general design of God, since by bringing 
human minds back to the truth that there 
is a Being who wills, it accustoms them to 



Cartesians 165 

consider all general laws as permanent acts, 
but also as the acts of the Being who wills. 
The miracle has the virtue of making every- 
thing in the world miraculous, which is true. 
Hence the miracle confirms the idea of order. 
Therein, perhaps alone, the exception proves 
the rule. 

Spinoza. — Spinoza, who during his life 
was a pure Stoic and the purest of Stoics, 
polishing the lenses of astronomical tele- 
scopes in order to gain his living, refusing 
all pensions and all the professorial positions 
offered to him, and living well-nigh on nothing, 
had read Descartes and, to conform to the 
principle of evidence, had begun by renounc- 
ing his religion, which was that of the Jews. 
His general outlook on the world was this: 
There is only one God. God is all. Only He 
has His attributes — that is to say, His manners 
of being and His modes, that is His modifica- 
tions, as the sun (merely a comparison) has as 
its manners of being, its roundness, colour, and 
heat, as modifications its rays, terrestrial heat, 
direct and diffused light, etc. Now God has 



166 Initiation into Philosophy 

two attributes, thought and extension, as 
had already been observed by Descartes; 
and for modifications He has exactly all we 
can see, touch, or feel, etc. The human 
soul is an attribute of God, as is everything 
else; it is an attribute of God in His power. 
It is not free, for all that comes from God, 
all that is of God, is a regular and necessary 
development of God Himself. "There is 
nothing contingent" [nothing which may 
either happen or not happen]. All things 
are determined, by the necessity of the divine 
nature, to exist and to act in a given manner. 
There is therefore no free-will in the soul, the 
soul is determined to will this or that by a 
cause which is itself determined by another 
and that by another, and so on to infinity. 
Nevertheless we believe ourselves to be 
free and according to the principle of evidence 
we are ; for nothing is more evident to us than 
our liberty. We are as intimately convinced 
of our liberty as of our existence and we all 
affirm, I am free, — with the same emphasis 
that Descartes affirms : I am. I am and I am 



Cartesians 167 

free are the two things it is impossible for 
man to doubt, no matter what effort he 
makes. 

No doubt, but it is an illusion. It is the 
illusion of a being who feels himself as cause, 
but does not feel himself as effect. Try to 
imagine a billiard ball which feels it moves 
others, but which does not feel that it is 
moved. What we call decision is an idea 
which decides us because it exercises more 
power over us than the others do; what we 
term deliberation is a hesitancy between two 
or three ideas which at the moment have 
equal force; what we name volition is an 
idea, and what we call will is our understand- 
ing applied to facts. We do not want to 
fight; we conceive the idea of fighting and 
the idea carries us away; we do not want to 
hang ourselves; we have the obsessing idea 
of hanging ourselves and this thought runs 
away with us. 

His Moral System. — Spinoza wrote a 
system of morality. Is it not radically 
impossible to write a system of morality 



168 Initiation into Philosophy 

when the author does not believe in free- 
will? The admirable originality of Spinoza, 
even though his idea can be contested, is 
precisely that morality depends on belief in 
the necessity of all things — that is, the more 
one is convinced of this necessity so much the 
more does one attain high morality — that is, 
the more one believes oneself free the more 
one is immoral. The man who believes 
himself free claims to run counter to the 
universal order, and morality precisely is 
adherence to it; the man who believes him- 
self free seeks for an individual good just as 
if there could be an individual good, just as if 
the best for each one were not to submit to 
the necessary laws of everything, laws which 
constitute what is good ; the man who thinks 
himself free sets himself against God, be- 
lieves himself God since he believes himself 
to be creator of what he does, and since he 
believes himself capable of deranging some- 
thing in the mechanism and of introducing a 
certain amount of movement. As a matter 
of fact, he does nothing of the kind; but he 



Cartesians 169 

believes that he does it, and this mere 
thought, false and low as it is, keeps him in 
the most miserable condition of life; to sum 
up, a man who believes himself free may not 
perhaps be an atheist, but he is ungodly. 

On the contrary, the man who does not 
believe himself free believes he is in the 
hands of God, and that is the beginning of 
wisdom and the beginning of virtue. We 
are in the hands of God as the clay is in those 
of the potter; the mad vase would be the one 
which reproached the potter for having 
made it small instead of big, common instead 
of decorative. It is the beginning of wisdom 
to believe oneself in the hands of God; to 
see Him, to see Him the least indistinctly 
that we can, therein lies the highest wisdom ; 
we must see His designs, or at least His great 
design and associate ourselves with it, thus 
becoming not only part of Him, which we 
always are, but a conscient part of Him. 

This is the love of God, and the love of 
God is virtue itself. We ought to love God 
without consideration of the good He can do 



170 Initiation into Philosophy 

us and of the penalties He can inflict upon us ; 
for to love God from love of a beneficent 
God or from fear of a punitive God is not to 
love God but to love oneself. 

The Passions. — We have our passions as 
enemies and as obstacles to our elevation to 
this semi-perfection. It is they which cause 
us to do immoral acts. "Immoral," has 
that a meaning from the moment that we do 
nothing which we are not obliged to do? 
Yes, just as when led by our deceitful mind 
we have arrived necessarily at a false idea, 
the fact of this thought being necessary does 
not prevent it from being false; we may 
have been led by necessity to commit a 
villainous action, but that does not prevent 
its being immoral. The passions are our 
imperfections, omissions, gaps in a soul 
which is not full of the idea of God and of 
universal order and the love of God and of 
universal order, and which, in consequence, 
lives individually — that is, separated from 
the universe. 

The passions are infinite in number and 



Cartesians 171 

Spinoza, in a bulky volume, furnished a 
minute and singularly profound description 
of the principal ones alone, into the details 
of which we regret that we cannot enter. 
The Ethics of Spinoza is an incomparable 
masterpiece. 

The study of the passions is very salutary, 
because in studying them one gets so de- 
tached from them that one can perceive their 
emptiness, their meanness, and their puerile, 
nay, even bestial character. It might even 
be added that the mere thought of studying 
them is already an act of detachment in 
reference to them. "Thou wouldst not seek 
Me, hadst thou not already found Me," 
said God to Pascal. "Thou wouldst not 
make investigations about us, hadst thou not 
already quitted us," the passions might say 
to the philosopher. 

Sanctions of Morality. — What are the 
sanctions of morality? They are necessary 
sanctions; just as everything is necessary 
and may even be said to be mechanical. 
There is neither merit nor demerit and the 



172 Initiation into Philosophy 

criminal is not culpable; only he is outside 
order, and everything must be in order. 
"He who is maddened by the bite of a mad 
dog is certainly innocent; yet anyone has 
the right to suffocate him. In the same 
way, the man who cannot govern his pas- 
sions by fear of the law is a very excusable 
invalid; yet he cannot enjoy peace of mind, 
or the knowledge of God, or even the love 
of God, and it is necessary that he perish." 
Through death he has re-entered within 
order. 

But does the sanction of beyond-the- 
grave exist, and is the soul immortal, and are 
we to be rewarded therein in another life? 
The conclusion of Spinoza on this matter 
is hesitating, but at the risk of misrepresent- 
ing it, which I fear to do, it seems to me that 
it can be thus summed up — The soul makes 
itself immortal, in proportion as by the 
knowledge and love of God it participates 
more in God. In proportion it makes itself 
divine; and approaching perfection, by the 
same progress it also approaches immortality. 



Cartesians 173 

It is conceivable that by error and sin it kills 
itself, and by virtue renders itself imperish- 
able. This immortality is not or does not 
seem to be personal, it is literally a definite 
re-entry into the bosom of God; Spinozian 
immortality would therefore be a prolong- 
ation of the same effort which we make in 
this life to adhere to universal order; the 
recompense for having adhered to it here 
below is to be absorbed in it there, and in 
that lies true beatitude. Here below we 
ought to see everything from the point of 
view of eternity (sub specie ceternitatis) , and 
this is a way of being eternal; elsewhere we 
shall be in eternity itself. 

Leibnitz. — Leibnitz possessed a universal 
mind, being historian, naturalist, politician, 
diplomatist, scholar, theologian, mathema- 
tician; here we will regard him only as 
philosopher. For Leibnitz the basis, the 
substance of all beings is not either thought 
or extension as with Descartes, but is force, 
productive of action. "What does not act 
does not exist." Everything that exists is a 



174 Initiation into Philosophy 

force, either action or tendency to action. 
And force, all force has two characteristics: 
it desires to do, it wishes to think. The 
world is the graduated compound of all these 
forces. Above all there is the supreme force, 
God, who is infinite force, infinite thought; 
by successive descents those base and obscure 
forces are reached which seem to have neither 
power nor thought, and yet have a mini- 
mum of power and even of thought, so to 
speak, latent. God thinks and acts infi- 
nitely ; man thinks and acts powerfully, thanks 
to reason, which distinguishes him from the 
rest of creation; the animal acts and thinks 
dimly, but it does act and think, for it has 
a soul composed of memory and of the 
results and consequences of memory, and 
by parenthesis "three-fourths of our own 
actions are governed by memory, and most 
frequently we act like animals"; plants act, 
and if they do not think, at least feel (which 
is still thought), though more dimly than 
animals; and finally in the mineral kingdom 
the power of action and thought slumber, but 



Cartesians 1 75 

are not non-existent since they can be 
transformed into plants, animals, and men, 
into living matter which feels and thinks. 
Therefore, as was later on to be maintained 
by Schopenhauer, everything is full of souls, 
and of souls which are forces as well as 
intelligences. The human soul is a force 
too, like the body. Between these two 
forces, which seem to act on one another and 
which certainly act in concert in such fashion 
that the movement desired by the soul is 
executed by the body or that the soul ob- 
viously assents to a movement desired by 
the body, what can be the affinity and the 
relation, in what consists their concurrence 
and concord? Leibnitz (and there was 
already something of the same nature sug- 
gested by Descartes) believes that all the 
forces of the world act, each spontaneously; 
but that among all the actions they perform 
there exists an agreement imposed by God, a 
concord establishing universal order, a "pre- 
established harmony" causing them all to 
co-operate in the same design. Well, then, 



176 Initiation into Philosophy 

between the soul, this force, and the body, 
this force also, this harmony reigns as 
between any force whatever in nature and 
one and all of the others; and that is the ex- 
planation of the union and concord between 
the soul and the body. Imagine two well- 
constructed clocks wound up by the same 
maker; they indicate the same hour, and it 
might appear that this one directs the other, 
or that the other directs the first. All the 
forces of the world are clocks which agree 
with each other, because they have been 
regulated in advance by the divine clock- 
maker, and they all indicate the eternal 
hour. 

The Radical Optimism of Leibnitz. — From 
all these general views on matter, on mind 
and on the mind, Leibnitz arrived at a 
radical optimism which is the thing for 
which he has since been most ridiculed, and 
by which, at any rate, he has remained 
famous. He believes that all is good, despite 
the evil of which no one can dispute the 
existence; and he believes that all is the best 



Cartesians 177 

possible in the best of possible worlds. In 
fact, God is supreme wisdom and supreme 
goodness; that was quite evident to Des- 
cartes, who in the matter of evidence was not 
easily satisfied. This perfect wisdom and 
perfect goodness could choose only what is 
best. — But yet evil exists! Diminish it as 
much as you choose, it still exists. — It exists 
by a necessity inherent in what is created. 
Everything created is imperfect. God alone 
is perfect; what is imperfect is by its defi- 
nition evil mingled with good. Evil is only 
the boundary of good, where God was 
compelled to stop in creating beings and 
things other than Himself, and if He had 
created only according to absolute goodness, 
He could have created only Himself. And 
that is the precise meaning of this phrase 
"the best of possible worlds"; the world is 
perfect so far as that which is created, and 
therefore imperfect, can be perfect; so far 
as what is not God can be divine; the world 
is God Himself as far as He can remain Him- 
self whilst being anything else than Himself. 
12 



178 Initiation into Philosophy 

The Three Evils. — Let us distinguish in 
order to comprehend better. There are 
three evils: the metaphysical, the physical, 
and the moral. Metaphysical evil is this 
very fact of not being perfection; it is na- 
tural enough that what emanates only from 
perfection should not be perfection. Physi- 
cal evil is suffering; God cannot will suffer- 
ing, desire it, or cherish it; but He can 
permit it as a means of good, as a condition 
of good; for there would be no moral good 
if there were not occasion for struggle, and 
there would be no occasion for struggling if 
physical evil did not exist; imagine a para- 
dise; all the inhabitants merely exist and 
never have cause to show the slightest endur- 
ance, the least courage, the smallest virtue. 
And finally, as to moral evil, which is sin, 
God can even less desire that it should exist, 
but He can admit its existence, allow it to be, 
to afford men occasion for merit or demerit. 
Nothing is more easy than to criticize God 
whilst considering only a portion of His work 
and not considering it as a whole. He must 



Cartesians 179 

have created it to be a whole and it is as a 
whole that it must be judged. And precisely 
because the whole cannot be comprehended by 
anyone, "hold thy peace, foolish reason," as 
Pascal said, and judge not or judge a priori, 
since here it is not possible to judge by ex- 
perience ; and declare that the Perfect can have 
willed only the most perfect that is possible. 

The Possible and the Impossible. — There 
still remains the fundamental objection: to 
reduce God to the conditions of the possible 
is to limit Him, and it is useless to say that 
God is justified if He has done all the good 
possible. He is not; the words "possible" 
and "impossible" having no meaning to 
Him who is omnipotent, and by definition 
infinite power could effect the impossible. 

Yes, Leibnitz replies, there is a meta- 
physical impossibility, there is an impossi- 
bility in the infinite; this impossibility 
is absurdity, is contradiction. Could God 
make the whole smaller than the part or any 
line shorter than a straight one? Reason 
replies in the negative. Is God therefore 



180 Initiation into Philosophy 

limited ? He is limited by the absurd and that 
means He is unlimited ; for the absurd is a fall- 
ing away. It is therefore credible that the mix- 
ture of evil and good is a metaphysical neces- 
sity to which I will not say God submits, but in 
which He acts naturally, and that the absence 
of evil is a metaphysical contradiction, an ab- 
surdity in itself, which God cannot commit 
precisely because He is perfect ; and no doubt, 
instead of drawing this conclusion, we should 
actually see it, were the totality of things, of 
their relations, of their concordance, and of 
their harmony known to us. 

The optimism of Leibnitz was ridiculed 
specially in the Candide of Voltaire, ingen- 
iously defended by Rousseau, magnificently 
defended by Victor Hugo in the following 
verses, well worthy of Leibnitz: 

"Oui peut-etre au dela de la sphere des nues, 

Au sein de cet azur immobile et dormant, 

Peut-etre faites-vous des choses inconnues 

Ou la douleur de Thomme entre comme 

element." 



CHAPTER III 

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVEN- 
TEENTH CENTURY 

Locke: His Ideas on Human Liberty, Morality, General 
Politics, and Religious Politics 

Locke. — Locke, very learned in various 
sciences — physics, chemistry, medicine, often 
associated with politics, receiving enlight- 
enment from life, from frequent travels, 
from friendships with interesting and il- 
lustrious men, always studying and re- 
flecting until an advanced old age, wrote 
only carefully premeditated works : his Trea- 
tise of Government and Essay on the Human 
Understanding. 

Locke appears to have written on the under- 
standing only in order to refute the "innate 
ideas" of Descartes. For Locke innate ideas 
have no existence. The mind before it 

181 



182 Initiation into Philosophy 

comes into contact with the external world 
is a blank sheet, and there is nothing in the 
mind which has not first come through the 
senses. What, then, are ideas? They are 
sensations registered by the brain, and they 
are also sensations elaborated and modified 
by reflection. These ideas then commingle 
in such a manner as to form an enormous 
mass of combinations. They are com- 
mingled either in a natural or an artificial 
manner. In a natural manner, that is in a 
way conforming to the great primary ideas 
given us by reflection, the idea of cause, the 
idea of end, the idea of means to an end, the 
idea of order, etc., and it is the harmony of 
these ideas which is commonly termed rea- 
son; they become associated by accident, by 
the effects of emotion, by the effect of custom, 
etc., and then they give birth to prejudices, 
errors, and superstitions. The passions of 
the soul are aspects of pleasure and pain. 
The idea of a possible pleasure gives birth 
in us to a desire which is called ambition, love, 
covetousness, gluttony ; the idea of a possible 



Seventeenth Century: England 183 

pain gives birth in us to fear and horror, 
and this fear and horror is called hatred, 
jealousy, rage, aversion, disgust, scorn. At 
bottom we have only two passions, the desire 
of enjoyment, and the fear of suffering. 

The Freedom of Man. — Is man free? 
Appealing to experience and making use 
only of it and not of intimate feeling, Locke 
declares in the negative. A will always 
seems to him determined by another will, 
and this other by another to infinity, or by 
a motive, a weight, a motive power which 
causes a leaning to right or left. Will cer- 
tainly exists — that is to say, an exact and 
lively desire to perform an action, or to con- 
tinue an action, or to interrupt an action, 
but this will is not free, for to represent it as 
free is to represent it as capable of wishing 
what it does not wish. The will is an anxiety 
to act in such or such a fashion, and this anx- 
iety, on account of its character of anxiety, of 
strong emotion, of tension of the soul, appears 
to us free, appears to us an internal force 
which is self-governed and independent; 



1 84 Initiation into Philosophy 

we feel consciousness of will in the effort. 
This tension must not be denied, but it must 
be recognised as the effect of a potent desire 
which the obstacle excites; this tension, 
therefore, is an indication of nothing except 
the potency of the desire and the existence 
of an obstacle. Now this desire, so potent 
that it is irritated by the obstacle, and, so 
to speak, unites us against it, is a passion 
dominating and filling our being; so that we 
are never more swayed by passion than 
when we believe ourselves to be exercising 
our will, and in consequence the more we 
desire the less are we free. 

It is not essential formally and absolutely 
to confound will with desire. Overpowered 
by heat, we desire to drink cold water, and 
because we know that that would do us 
harm we have the will not to drink; but 
although this is an important distinction it 
is not a fundamental one; what incites us to 
drink is a passion, what prevents us is an- 
other passion, one more general and stronger, 
the desire not to die, and because this pas- 



Seventeenth Century : England 185 

sion by meeting with and fighting another 
produces in all our being a powerful tension, 
it is none the less a passion, even if we ought 
not to say that it is a still more impassioned 
passion. 

Locke's Theory of Politics. — In politics 
Locke was the adversary of Hobbes, whose 
theories of absolutism have already been 
noticed. He did not believe that the natural 
state was the war of all against all. He 
believed men formed societies not to escape 
cannibalism, but more easily to guarantee 
and protect their natural rights: ownership, 
personal liberty, legitimate defence. Society 
exists only to protect these rights, and the 
reason of its existence lies in this duty to 
defend them. The sovereign therefore is 
not the saviour of the nation, he is its law- 
maker and magistrate. If he violates the 
rights of man, he acts so directly contrary 
to his mission and his mandate that insur- 
rection against him is legitimate. The "wise 
Locke, " as Voltaire always called him, was 
the inventor of the Rights of Man. 



1 86 Initiation into Philosophy 

In religious politics he was equally liberal 
and advocated the separation of Church and 
State ; the State, according to him, should not 
have any religion of its own, its province 
being only to protect equally the liberty of 
all denominations. Locke was discussed 
minutely by Leibnitz, who, without accept- 
ing the innate ideas of Descartes, did not 
accept the ideas through sensation of Locke, 
and said : "There is nothing in the intelligence 
which has not first been in the senses," 
granted . . . "except the intelligence itself." 
The intelligence has not innate ideas born 
ready made ; but it possesses forms of its own 
in which the ideas arrange themselves and 
take shape, and this is the due province of 
the intelligence. And it was these forms 
which later on Kant was to call the categories 
of the intellect, and at bottom Descartes 
meant nothing else by his innate ideas. 
Locke exerted a prodigious and even imperi- 
ous influence over the French philosophers 
of the eighteenth century. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Berkeley: Highly Idealist Philosophy which Regarded 

Matter as Non-existent 

David Hume: Sceptical Philosophy 

The Scottish School: Common Sense Philosophy 

Berkeley. — To the "sensualist" Locke suc- 
ceeded Berkeley, the unrestrained "idealist," 
like him an Englishman. He began to write 
when very young, continued to write until 
he was sixty, and died at sixty-eight. He 
believed neither in matter nor in the ex- 
ternal world. There was the whole of his 
philosophy. Why did he not believe in 
them? Because all thinkers are agreed 
that we cannot know whether we see the 
external world as it is. Then, if we do not 
know it, why do we affirm that it exists? 
We know nothing about it. Now we ought 
187 



188 Initiation into Philosophy 

to build up the world only with what we 
know of it, and to do otherwise is not philo- 
sophy but yielding to imagination. What 
is it that we know of the world? Our ideas, 
and nothing but our ideas. Very well then, 
let us say : there are only ideas. But whence 
do these ideas come to us? To explain them 
as coming from the external world which 
we have never seen is to explain obscurity 
by denser darkness. They are spiritual, 
they come to us without doubt from a spirit, 
from God. This is possible, it is not illogical, 
and Berkeley believes it. 

This doctrine regarded by the eyes of 
common sense may appear a mere phantasy; 
but Berkeley saw in it many things of high 
importance and great use. If you believe 
in matter, you can believe in matter only, and 
that is materialism with its moral conse- 
quences, which are immoral; if you believe 
in matter and in God, you are so hampered 
by this dualism that you do not know how 
to separate nature from God, and it therefore 
comes to pass that you see God in matter, 



Eighteenth Century : England 189 

which is called pantheism. In a word, be- 
tween us and God Berkeley has suppressed 
matter in order that we should come, as it 
were, into direct contact with God. He 
derives much from Malebranche, and it 
may be said he only pushes his theories to 
their extreme. Although a bishop, he was 
not checked, like Descartes, by the idea of 
God not being able to deceive us, and he 
answered that God does not deceive us, 
that He gives us ideas and that it is we who 
deceive ourselves by attributing them to 
any other origin than to Him; nor was he 
checked, like Malebranche, by the authority 
of Scripture, which in Genesis portrays God 
creating matter. He saw there, no doubt, 
only a symbolical sense, a simple way of 
speaking according to the comprehension of 
the multitude. 

David Hume. — David Hume, a Scotsman, 
better known, at least in his own times, as the 
historian of England than as a philosopher, 
nevertheless well merits consideration in the 
latter category. David Hume believes in 



190 Initiation into Philosophy 

nothing, and, in consequence, it may be said 
that he is not a philosopher; he has no philo- 
sophic system. He has no philosophic sys- 
tem, it is true ; but he is a critic of philosophy, 
and therefore he philosophizes. Matter has 
no existence; as we know nothing about it, 
we should not say it exists. But we our- 
selves, we exist. All that we can know 
about that is that in us there is a succession 
of ideas, of representations; but we, but /, 
what is that? Of that we know nothing. 
We are present at a series of pictures, and 
we may call their totality the ego; but We do 
not grasp ourselves as a thing of unity, as an 
individual. We are the spectators of an 
inward dramatic piece behind which we can 
see no author. There is no more reason to 
believe in oneself than in the external world. 
Innate Ideas. — As for innate ideas, they 
are simply general ideas, which are general 
delusions. We believe, for instance, that 
every effect has a cause, or, to express it 
more correctly, that everything has a cause. 
What do we know about it? What do we 



Eighteenth Century: England 191 

see? That one thing follows another, suc- 
ceeds to another. What tells us that the 
latter proceeds from the former, that the 
thing B must necessarily come, owing to 
the thing A existing? We believe it because 
every time the thing A has been, the thing B 
has come. Well, let us say that every time 
A has been (thus far) B has come ; and say no 
more. There are regular successions, but 
we are completely ignorant whether there are 
causes for them. 

The Liberty and Morality of Hume. — It 
results from this that for Hume there is no 
liberty. Very obviously; for when we be- 
lieve ourselves free, it is because we believe 
we can fix upon ourselves as a cause. Now 
the word "cause" means nothing. We are 
a succession of phenomena very absolutely 
determined. The proof is that we foresee 
and nearly always accurately (and we could 
always foresee accurately if we completely 
knew the character of the persons and the 
influences acting on them) what people we 
know will do, which would be impossible 



192 Initiation into Philosophy 

if they did as they wished. And I, at the 
very moment when I am absolutely sure I am 
doing such and such a thing because I de- 
sired to, I see my friend smile as he says: 
"I was sure you would do that. See, I 
wrote it down on this piece of paper." He 
understood me as a necessity, when I felt 
myself to be free. And he, reciprocally, 
will believe himself free in doing a thing I 
would have wagered to a certainty that he 
would not fail to do. 

What system of morality can Hume have 
with these principles? First of all, he pro- 
tests against those who should deduce from 
his principles the immorality of his system. 
Take care, said he wittily (just like Spinoza, 
by the way), it is the partisans of free-will 
who are immoral. No doubt! It is when 
there is liberty that there is no responsibility. 
I am not responsible for my actions if they 
have no connection in me with anything dur- 
able or constant. I have committed mur- 
der. Truly it is by chance, if it was by an 
entirely isolated determination, entirely de- 



Eighteenth Century : England 193 

tached from the rest of my character, and 
momentary; and I am only infinitesimally 
responsible. But if all my actions are linked 
together, are conditional upon one another, 
dependent on one another, if I have com- 
mitted murder it is because I am an assassin 
at every moment of my life or nearly so, 
and then, oh! how responsible I am! 

Note that this is the line taken up by 
judges, since they make careful investigation 
of the antecedents of the accused. They 
find him all the more culpable if he has 
always shown bad instincts. — Therefore they 
find him the more responsible, the more he 
has been compelled by necessity. — Yes. 

Hume then does not believe himself 
"foreclosed" in morality; he does not be- 
lieve he is forbidden by his principles to have 
a system of morality and he has one. It 
is a morality of sentiment. We have in us 
the instinct of happiness and we seek happi- 
ness; but we have also in us an instinct of 
goodwill which tends to make us seek the 
general happiness, and reason tells us that 
13 



194 Initiation into Philosophy 

there is conciliation or rather concordance 
between these two instincts, because it is only 
in the general happiness that we find our 
particular happiness. 

The Scottish School: Reid; Stewart. — 
The Scottish School (end of the eighteenth 
century) was pre-eminently a school of men 
who attached themselves to common sense 
and were excellent moralists. We must at 
any rate mention Thomas Reid and Dugald 
Stewart. They were bent especially on 
opposing the transcendent idealism of Berke- 
ley and the scepticism of David Hume, also 
in some measure Locke's doctrine of the 
blank sheet. They reconstituted the human 
mind and even the world (which had been so 
to speak driven off in vapour by their prede- 
cessors), much as they were in the time of 
Descartes. Let us believe, they said, in the 
reality of the external world; let us believe 
that there are causes and effects; let us 
believe there is an ego, a human person whom 
we directly apprehend, and who is a cause; 
let us believe that we are free and that we are 



Eighteenth Century : England 195 

responsible because we are free, etc. They 
were, pre-eminently, excellent describers of 
states of the soul, admirable psychological 
moralists and they were the ancestors of the 
highly remarkable pleiad of English psycho- 
logists of the nineteenth century. 






CHAPTER V 

FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY 

Voltaire a Disciple of Locke 

Rousseau a Freethinking Christian, but deeply Imbued 

with Religious Sentiments 

Diderot a Capricious Materialist 

D'Holbach and Helvetius Avowed Materialists 

Condillac a Philosopher of Sensations 

Voltaire; Rousseau. — The French philo- 
sophy of the eighteenth century, fairly feeble 
it must be avowed, seemed as if dominated 
by the English philosophy, excepting Berke- 
ley, but especially by Locke and David 
Hume, more particularly Locke, who was the 
intellectual deity of those Frenchmen of that 
epoch who were interested in philosophy. 

Whenever Voltaire dealt with philosophy, 

he was only the echo of Locke whose depths 

he failed to fathom, and to whom he has 

done some injury, for reading Locke only 

196 



Eighteenth Century : France 197 

through Voltaire has led to the belief that 
Locke was superficial. 

Rousseau was both the disciple and adver- 
sary of Hobbes, as often occurs, and dealt 
out to the public the doctrines of Hobbes 
in an inverted form, making the state of 
nature angelic instead of infernal, and putting 
the government of all by all in the place of 
government by one, invariably reaching 
the same point with a simple difference of 
form; for if Hobbes argued for despotism 
exercised by one over all, Rousseau argued 
for the despotism of all over each. In Emile, 
he was incontestably inspired by the ideas 
of Locke on education in some degree, but 
in my opinion less than has been asserted. 
On nearly all sides it has been asserted that 
Rousseau exercised great influence over 
Kant. I know that Kant felt infinite admira- 
tion for Rousseau, but of the influence of 
Rousseau upon Kant I have never been 
able to discover a trace. 

Diderot; Helvetius; D'Holbach. — It was 
particularly on David Hume that Diderot 






198 Initiation into Philosophy 

depended. The difference, which is great, 
is that David Hume in his scepticism re- 
mained a grave, reserved man, well-bred 
and discreet, and was only a sceptic, whilst 
Diderot was violent in denial and a man of 
paradoxes and jests, both impertinent and 
cynical. 

It is almost ridiculous in a summary 
history of philosophy to name as sub-Dide- 
rots, if one may so express it, Helvetius and 
D'Holbach, who were merely wits believing 
themselves philosophers, and who were not 
always wits. 

Condillac— Condillac belongs to another 
category. He was a very serious philosopher 
and a vigorous thinker. An exaggerated dis- 
ciple of Locke, while the latter admitted 
sensation and reflection as the origin of ideas, 
Condillac admitted only pure sensation and 
transformed sensation — that is to say, sen- 
sation transforming itself. The definition 
of man that he deduces from these principles 
is very celebrated and it is interesting: "The 
ego of each man is only the collection of the 



Eighteenth Century : France 199 

sensations that he feels and of those his 
memory recalls; it is the consciousness of 
what he is combined with the recollection of 
what he has been." To Condillac, the idea 
is a sensation which has fixed itself and 
which has been renewed and vivified by- 
others; desire is a sensation which wishes to 
be repeated and seeks what opportunity offers 
for its renewal, and the will itself is only 
the most potent of desires. Condillac was 
voluntarily and systematically limited, but 
his system is well knit and presented in 
admirably clear and precise language. 



CHAPTER VI 

KANT 

Kant Reconstructed all Philosophy by Supporting it 
on Morality 

Knowledge. — Kant, born at Konigsberg 
in 1724, was professor there all his life and 
died there in 1804. Nothing happened to 
him except the possession of genius. He had 
commenced with the theological philosophy 
in use in his country, that of Wolf, which on 
broad lines was that of Leibnitz. But he 
early read David Hume, and the train of 
thought of the sceptical Scotsman at least 
gave him the idea of submitting all philo- 
sophic ideas to a severe and close criticism. 

He first of all asked himself what the true 
value is of our knowledge and what know- 
ledge is. We believe generally that it is the 
things which give us the knowledge that we 
200 



Kant 201 

have of them. But, rather, is it not we who 
impose on things the forms of our mind and 
is not the knowledge that we believe we have 
of things only the knowledge which we take 
of the laws of our mind by applying it to 
things? This is what is most probable. 
We perceive the things by moulds, so to 
speak, which are in ourselves and which give 
them their shapes and they would be shape- 
less and chaotic were it otherwise. Con- 
sequently, it is necessary to distinguish the 
matter and the form of our knowledge: the 
matter of the knowledge is the things them- 
selves. The form of our knowledge is our- 
selves: "Our experimental knowledge is a 
compound of what we receive from impres- 
sions and of what our individual faculty of 
knowing draws from itself on the occasion of 
these impressions. " 

Sensibility; Understanding; Reason. — 
Those who believe that all we think pro- 
ceeds from the senses are therefore wrong; so 
too are those wrong who believe that all 
we think proceeds from ourselves. To say, 



202 Initiation into Philosophy 

Matter is an appearance, and to say, Ideas 
are appearances, are equally false doctrines. 
Now we know by sensibility, by understand- 
ing, and by reason. By sensibility we 
receive the impression of phenomena; by 
the understanding we impose on these 
impressions their forms, and link them up 
together; by reason we give ourselves gen- 
eral ideas of things — universal ones, going 
beyond or believing they go beyond the data, 
even when linked up and systematized. 

Let us analyse sensibility, understanding, 
and reason. Sensibility already has the 
forms it imposes on things. These forms 
are time and space. Time and space are 
not given us by matter like colour, smell, 
taste, or sound ; they are not perceived by the 
senses; they are therefore the forms of our 
sensibility: we can feel only according to 
time and space, by lodging what we feel in 
space and time; these are the conditions of 
sensibility. Phenomena are thus perceived 
by us under the laws of space and of time. 
What do they become in us? They are 



Kant 203 

seized by the understanding, which also has 
its forms, its powers of classification, of 
arrangement, and of connection. Its forms 
or powers, or, putting it more exactly, its 
active forms are, for example, the conception 
of quantity being always equal: through all 
phenomena the quantity of substance re- 
mains always the same; the conception of 
causality: everything has a cause and every 
cause has an effect and it is ever thus. Those 
are the conditions of our understanding, 
those without which we do not understand 
and the forms which within us we impose 
on all things in order to understand them. 
It is thus that we know the world ; which is 
tantamount to stating that the world exists, 
so far as we are concerned, only so long as 
we think so. Reason would go further: it 
would seize the most general, the universal, 
beyond experience, beyond the limited and 
restricted systematizations established by 
the understanding; to know, for instance, 
the first cause of all causes, the last and 
collective end, so to speak, of all purposes; 



204 Initiation into Philosophy 

to know "why is there something?" and 
"in view of what end is there something?" 
in fact, to answer all the questions of infinity 
and eternity. Be sure that it cannot. How 
could it? It only operates, can only operate, 
on the data of experience and the sys- 
tematizations of the understanding, which 
classify experience but do not go beyond it. 
Only operating upon that, having nothing 
except that as matter, how could it itself go 
beyond experience? It cannot. It is only 
(a highly important fact, and one which 
must on no account be forgotten) — it is only 
a sign, merely a witness. It is the sign that 
the human spirit has need of the absolute; 
it is itself that need; without that it would 
not exist; it is the witness of our invincible 
insistence on knowing and of our tendency 
to estimate that we know nothing if we only 
know something; it is itself that insistence 
and that tendency: without that it would not 
exist. Let us pause there for the moment. 
Man knows of nature only those impressions 
which he receives from it, co-ordinated by 



Kant 205 

the forms of sensibility, and further the ideas 
of it which he preserves co-ordinated by 
the forms of his understanding. This is very 
little. It is all, if we consider only pure 
reason. 

Practical Reason. — But there is perhaps 
another reason, or another aspect of reason — 
to wit, practical reason. What is practical 
reason? Something in us tells us : you should 
act, and you should act in such a way; you 
should act rightly ; this is not right, so do not 
do it; that is right, do it. As a fact this is 
uncontestable. What is the explanation? 
From what data of experience, from what 
systematization of the understanding has our 
mind borrowed this? Where has it got it? 
Does nature yield obedience to a "you 
ought"? Not at all. It exists, and it 
develops and it goes its way, according to 
our way of seeing it in time and space, and 
that is all. Does the understanding furnish 
the idea of "you ought"? By no means; it 
gives us ideas of quantity, of quality, of cause 
and effect, etc., and that is all; there is no 



2o6 Initiation into Philosophy 

"you ought" in all that. Therefore this 
"you ought" is purely human; it is the only 
principle which comes exactly from ourselves 
only. It might therefore well be the very 
foundation of us. — It may be an illusion. — ■ 
No doubt, but it is highly remarkable that 
it exists, though nothing gives it birth or is of 
a nature to give it birth. An illusion is a 
weakness of the senses or an error of logic 
and is thus explained ; but an illusion in itself 
and by itself and only proceeding from itself 
is most singular and not to be explained as 
an illusion. Hence it remains that it is a 
reality, a reality of our nature, and given 
the coercive force of its voice and act, it is 
the most real reality there is in us. 

The Categorical Imperative. — Thus, at 
least, thought Kant, and he said: There is a 
practical reason which does not go beyond 
experience and does not seek to go beyond 
it; but which does not depend on it, is abso- 
lutely separated from it, and is its own 
(human) experience by itself. This practi- 
cal reason says to us : you ought to do good. 



Kant 207 

The crowd call it conscience; I call it in a 
general way practical reason, and I call it the 
categorical imperative when I take it in its 
principle, without taking into account the 
applications which I foresee. Why this 
name? To distinguish it clearly; for we feel 
ourselves commanded by other things than 
it, but not in the same way. We feel our- 
selves commanded by prudence, for instance, 
which tells us: do not run down that stair- 
case if you do not wish to break your neck; 
we feel ourselves commanded by the con- 
ventions which say: be polite if you do not 
wish men to leave you severely alone, etc. 
But conscience does not say if to us : it says 
bluntly "you ought" without consideration 
of what may or may not happen, and it is 
even part of its character to scorn all con- 
sideration of consequences. It would tell 
us: run down that staircase to save that 
child even at the risk of breaking your neck. 
Because of that I call all the other command- 
ments made to us hypothetical imperatives 
and that of conscience, alone, the categorical 






208 Initiation into Philosophy 

or absolute imperative. Here is a definite 
result. 

Morality, the Law of Man. — Yet reflect: 
if the foregoing be true, morality is the very 
law of man, his especial law, as the law of the 
tree is to spread in roots and branches. 
Well. But for man to be able to obey his law 
he must be free, must be able to do what he 
wishes. That is certain. Then it must be 
believed that we are free, for were we not, we 
could not obey our law; and the moral law 
would be absurd. The moral law is the sign 
that we are free. Compared to this, all the 
other proofs of freedom are worthless or 
weak. We are free because we must be so in 
order to do the good which our law commands 
us to do. 

Let us examine further. I do what is 
right in order to obey the law; but, when I 
have done it, I have the idea that it would 
be unjust that I should be punished for it, or 
that I should not be rewarded for it, that it 
would be unjust were there not concordance 
between right and happiness. As it happens, 



Kant 209 

virtue is seldom rewarded in this world and 
often is even punished; it draws misfortune 
or evil on him who practises it. Would not 
that be the sign that there are two worlds 
of which we see only one? Would not that 
be the sign that virtue unrewarded here will 
be rewarded elsewhere in order that there 
should not be injustice? It is highly pro- 
bable that this is so. 

But for that it is necessary that the soul be 
immortal. It is so, since it is necessary that 
it should be. The moral law is accomplished 
and consummated in rewards or penalties 
beyond the grave, which pre-suppose the 
immortality of the soul. All the other 
proofs of the immortality of the soul are 
worthless or feeble beside this one which 
demonstrates that were there no immortality 
of the soul there would be no morality. 

God. — And, finally, if justice is one day 
to be done, this supposes a Judge. It is 
neither ourselves who in another life will 
do justice to ourselves nor yet some force 
of circumstances which will do it to us. It is 
14 



210 Initiation into Philosophy- 
necessary to have an intelligence conceiving 
justice and a will to realise it. God is this 
intelligence and this will. 

All the other proofs of God are weak or 
worthless beside this one. The existence of 
God has been deduced from the idea of God : 
if we have the idea of God, it is necessary 
that He should exist. A weak proof, for we 
can have an idea which does not correspond 
with an object. The existence of God has 
been deduced from the idea of causality; for 
all that is, a cause is necessary, this cause is 
God. A weak proof, for things being as they 
are, there is necessity for . . . cause; but a 
cause and a single cause, why? There 
could be a series of causes to infinity and thus 
the cause of the world could be the world 
itself. The existence of God has been de- 
duced from the idea of design well carried out. 
The composition, the ordering of this world 
is admired; this world is well made; it is like 
a clock. The clock supposes a clock-maker; 
the fine composition of the world supposes 
an intelligence which conceived a work to 



Kant 211 

be made and which made it. Perhaps; 
but this consideration only leads to the idea 
of a manipulation of matter, of a demiurge, 
as the Greeks said, of an architect, but not 
to the idea of a Creator; it may even lead 
only to the idea of several architects and the 
Greeks perfectly possessed the idea of a fine 
artistic order existing in the world when they 
believed in a great number of deities. This 
proof also is therefore weak, although Kant 
always treats it with respect. 

The sole convincing proof is the existence 
of the moral law in the heart of man. For 
the moral law to be accomplished, for it 
not to be merely a tyrant over man, for 
it to be realised in all its fulness, weigh- 
ing on man here but rewarding him in- 
finitely elsewhere, which means there is 
justice in all that, it is necessary that some- 
where there should be an absolute realizer 
of justice. God must exist for the world to 
be moral. 

Why is it necessary for the world to be 
moral? Because an immoral world with 



212 Initiation into Philosophy 

even a single moral being in it would be a 
very strange thing. 

Thus, whilst the majority of philosophers 
deduced human liberty from God, and the 
spirituality of the soul from human liberty, 
the immortality of the soul from human 
spirituality, and morality from human im- 
mortality, Kant starts from morality as from 
the incontestable fact, and from morality de- 
duces liberty, and from liberty spirituality, 
and God from the immortality of the soul 
with the consequent realization of justice. 

He has effected an extraordinarily power- 
ful reversal of the argument generally em- 
ployed. 

The Influence of Kant. — The influence of 
Kant has been incomparable or, if you will, 
comparable only to those of Plato, Zeno, and 
Epicurus. Half at least of the European 
philosophy of the nineteenth century has 
proceeded from him and is closely connected 
with him. Even in our own day, prag- 
matism, as it is called — that is, the doctrine 
which lays down that morality is the measure 



Kant 213 

of truth and that an idea is true only if it be 
morally useful — is perhaps an alteration of 
Kantism, a Kantian heresy, but entirely 
penetrated with and, as it were, excited by 
the spirit of Kant. 






CHAPTER VII 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY 

The Great Reconstructors of the World, Analogous to the 

First Philosophers of Antiquity. 

Great General Systems: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc. 

Fichte. — Fichte, embarrassed by what re- 
mained of experience in the ideas of Kant, 
by the part, restricted though it was, which 
Kant left to things in the external world, 
completely suppressed the external world, 
like Berkeley, and affirmed the existence of 
the human ego alone. Kant said that the 
world furnished us with the matter of the 
idea and that we furnished the form. Accord- 
ing to Fichte, form and matter alike came 
from us. What then is sensation? It is 
nothing except the pause of the ego encount- 
ering what is not self, the impact of the ego 
against what limits it. — But then the ex- 
214 



Nineteenth Century: Germany 215 

ternal world does exist, for how could our 
mind be encountered by nothing and there 
be an impact of our mind against nothing? — ■ 
But this non-self that encounters self is pre- 
cisely a product of self, a product of the 
imagination which creates an object, which 
projects outside us an appearance before 
which we pause as before something real 
which should be outside us. 

This theory is very difficult to understand, 
but indicates a very fine effort of the mind. 

Yet outside ourselves is there anything? 
There is pure spirit, God. What is God? 
For Fichte He is moral order (a very evident 
recollection of Kant). Morality is God and 
God is morality. We are in God, and it is 
the whole of religion, when we do our duty 
without any regard to the consequences of 
our actions; we are outside God, and it is 
atheism, when we act in view of what results 
our actions may have. And thus morality 
and religion run into one another, and 
religion is only morality in its plenitude and 
complete morality is the whole of religion. 



216 Initiation into Philosophy 

"The holy, the beautiful, and the good are 
the immediate apparition [if it could be] in us 
of the essence of God." 

Schelling. — Schelling desired to correct 
what, according to him, was too radical in the 
idealism of Fichte. He restored the external 
world; for him the non-ego and the ego both 
exist and the two are nature, nature which is 
the object in the world regarded by man, 
the subject when it regards man, subject and 
object according to the case; in itself and in 
its totality neither subject nor object, but 
absolute, unlimited, indeterminate. Con- 
fronting this world (that is nature and man) 
there is another world which is God. God is 
the infinite and the perfect, and particularly 
the perfect and infinite will. The world 
that we know is a debasement from that 
without our being able to conceive how 
the perfect can be degraded, and how 
an emanation of the perfect can be imper- 
fect and how the non-being can come out 
of being, since relatively to the infi- 
nite, the finite has no existence, and 



Nineteenth Century: Germany 217 

relatively to perfection, the imperfect is 
nothing. 

It appears however that it is thus, and 
that the world is an emanation of God in 
which He degrades Himself and a degra- 
dation of God such that it opposes itself to 
Him as nothing to everything. It is a fall. 
The fall of man in the Scriptures may give 
an idea, however distant, of that. 

Hegel. — Hegel, a contemporary of Schell- 
ing, and often in contradiction to him, is the 
philosopher of "becoming" and of the idea 
which always "becomes" something. The 
essence of all is the idea, but the idea in pro- 
gress; the idea makes itself a thing according 
to a rational law which is inherent in it, 
and the thing makes itself an idea in the 
sense that the idea contemplating the thing 
it has become thinks it and fills itself with it 
in order to become yet another thing, always 
following the rational law; and this very 
evolution, all this evolution, all this be- 
coming, is that absolute for which we 
are always searching behind things, at the 



218 Initiation into Philosophy 

root of things, and which is in the things 
themselves. 

The rationally active is everything; and 
activity and reality are synonyms, and all 
reality is active, and what is not active is not 
real, and what is not active has no existence. 

Let not this activity be regarded as always 
advancing forward; the becoming is not a 
river which flows; activity is activity and 
retro-activity. The cause is cause of the 
effect, but also the effect is cause of its cause. 
In fact the cause would not be cause if it 
had no effect; it is therefore, thanks .to its 
effect, because of its effect, that the cause is 
cause; and therefore the effect is the cause 
of the cause as much as the cause is cause of 
the effect. 

A government is the effect of the character 
of a people, and the character of a people is 
the effect also of its government; my son 
proceeds from me, but he reacts on me, 
and because I am his father I have the 
character which I gave him, more pronounced 
than before, etc. 



Nineteenth Century: Germany 219 

Hence, all effect is cause as all cause is 
effect, which everybody has recognized, but 
in addition all effect is cause of its cause 
and in consequence, to speak in common 
language, all effect is cause forward and 
backward, and the line of causes and effects 
is not a straight line but a circle. 

The Deism of Hegel. — God disappears 
from all that. No, Hegel is very formally a 
deist, but he sees God in the total of things 
and not outside things, yet distinct. In what 
way distinct? In this, that God is the total- 
ity of things considered not in themselves 
but in the spirit that animates them and the 
force that urges them, and because the soul 
is of necessity in the body, united to the 
body, that is no reason why it should not 
be distinct from it. And having taken up 
this position, Hegel is a deist and even 
accepts proofs of the existence of God which 
are regarded by some as hackneyed. He 
accepts them, only holding them not exactly 
as proofs, but as reasons for belief, and as 
highly faithful descriptions of the necessary 



220 Initiation into Philosophy 

elevation of the soul to God. For example, 
the ancient philosophers proved the existence 
of God by the contemplation of the marvels 
of the universe: "That is not a 'proof,'" 
said Hegel, "that is not a proof, but it is a 
great reason for belief; for it is an exposition, 
a very exact although incomplete account 
rendered of the fact that by contemplation 
of the world the human mind rises to God. " 
Now this fact is of singular importance: it 
indicates that it is impossible to think 
strongly without thinking of God. "When 
the passage [although insufficiently logical] 
from the finite to the infinite does not take 
place, it may be said that there is no 
thought. " Now this is a reason for belief. 

After the same fashion, the philosophers 
have said "from the moment that we imagine 
God, the reason is that He is." Kant ridi- 
culed this proof. Granted, it is not an 
invincible proof, but this fact alone that we 
cannot imagine God without affirming His 
existence indicates a tendency of our mind 
which is to relate finite thought to infinite 



Nineteenth Century: Germany 221 

thought and not to admit an imperfect 
thought which should not have its source in a 
perfect thought ; and that is rather an invin- 
cible belief than a proof, but that this belief 
is invincible and necessary in itself is an 
extremely commanding proof, although a 
relative one. 

His Political Philosophy. — The philosophy 
of the human mind and political philosophy 
according to Hegel are these. Primitive 
man is mind, reason, conscience, but he is 
so only potentially, as the philosophers 
express it; that is to say, he is so only in 
that he is capable of becoming so. Really, 
practically, he is only instincts: he is egoist 
like the animals [it should be said like the 
greater part of the animals], and follows his 
egoistical appetites. Society, in whatever 
manner it has managed to constitute itself, 
transforms him and his "becoming" com- 
mences. From the sexual instinct it makes 
marriage, from capture it forms regulated 
proprietorship, out of defence against vio- 
lence it makes legal punishment, etc. Hence- 



222 Initiation into Philosophy 

forth, and all his evolution tends to that, 
man proceeds to substitute in himself the 
general will for the particular will; he tends 
to disindividualize himself. The general 
will, founded upon general utility, is that the 
man be married, father, head of a family, 
good husband, good father, good relative, 
good citizen. All that man ought to be 
in consideration of the general will which he 
has put in the place of his own, and which 
he has made his own will. That is the first 
advance. 

It is realized (always imperfectly) in the 
smallest societies, in the cities, in the little 
Greek republics, for example. 

Here is the second advance. By war, by 
conquest, by annexations, by more gentle 
means when possible, the stronger cities sub- 
due the weaker, and the great State is created. 
The great State has a more important part 
than the city; it continues to substitute the 
general will for the particular wills; but, in 
addition, it is an idea, a great civilizing idea, 
benevolent, elevating, aggrandizing, to which 



Nineteenth Century: Germany 223 

private interests must and should be sacrificed. 
Such were the Romans who considered them- 
selves, not without reason, as the legislators 
and civilizers of the world. 

The Ideal Form of State. — Putting aside 
for a while the continuation of this subject, 
what political form should the great State 
take to conform to its destiny? Assuredly 
the monarchical form; for the republican 
form is always too individualist. To Hegel, 
the Greeks and even the Romans seem to 
have conceded too much to individual liberty 
or to the interests of class, of caste; they 
possessed an imperfect idea of the rights and 
functions of the State. The ideal form of 
the State is monarchy. It is necessary for 
the State to be contracted, gathered up, and 
personified in a prince who can be person- 
ally loved, who can be reverenced, which 
is precisely what is needed. These great 
States are only really great if they possess 
strong cohesion; it is therefore necessary 
that they should be nationalities, as it is 
called — that is, that they should be inwardly 



224 Initiation into Philosophy 

very united and highly homogeneous by 
community of race, religion, customs, lan- 
guage, etc. The idea to be realized by a State 
can only be accomplished if there be a suf- 
ficient community of ideas in the people con- 
stituting it. However the great State will 
be able to, and even ought to, conquer and 
annex the small ones in order to become 
stronger and more capable, being stronger, 
of realizing its idea. Only this should be 
done merely when it is certain or clearly 
apparent that it represents an idea as against 
a people which does not, or that it presents a 
better, greater, and nobler idea than that 
represented by the people it attacks. 

War. — But, as each people will always find 
its own idea finer than that of another, how 
is this to be recognized?' — By victory itself. 
It is victory which proves that a people . . . 
was stronger than another! — Not only 
stronger materially but representing a 
greater, more practical, more fruitful idea 
than the other; for it is precisely the idea 
which supports a people and renders it 



Nineteenth Century : Germany 225 

strong. Thus, victory is the sign of the 
moral superiority of a people, and in conse- 
quence force indicates where right is and is 
indistinguishable from right itself, and we 
must not say as may already perhaps have 
been said: "Might excels right," but "Might 
is right" or "Right is might." 

For example [Hegel might have said], 
France was "apparently" within her rights 
in endeavouring to conquer Europe from 
1792 to 1 815; for she represented an idea, 
the revolutionary idea, which she might con- 
sider, and which many besides the French 
did consider, an advance and a civilizing idea; 
but she was beaten, which proves that the idea 
was false; and before this demonstration by 
events is it not true that the republican or 
Caesarian idea is inferior to that of tra- 
ditional monarchy? Hegel would certainly 
have reasoned thus on this point. 

Therefore war is eternal and must be so. 
It is history itself, being the condition of his- 
tory; it is even the evolution of humanity, 
being the condition of that evolution; there- 
15 



226 Initiation into Philosophy 

fore, it is divine. Only it is purifying itself; 
formerly men only fought, or practically 
always, from ambition; now wars are waged 
for principles, to effect the triumph of an 
idea which has a future, and which contains 
the future, over one that is out of date and 
decayed. The future will see a succession of 
the triumphs of might which, by definition, 
will be triumphs of right and which will be 
triumphs of increasingly fine ideas over ideas 
that are barbarous and justly condemned to 
perish. 

Hegel has exercised great influence on the 
ideas of the German people both in internal 
and external politics. 

Art, Science, and Religion. — The ideas of 
Hegel on art, science, and religion are the 
following: Under the shelter of the State 
which is necessary for their peaceful develop- 
ment in security and liberty, science, litera- 
ture, art, and religion pursue aims not superior 
to but other than those of the State. They 
seek, without detaching the individual from 
the society, to unite him to the whole world. 



Nineteenth Century: Germany 227 

Science makes him know all it can of nature 
and its laws; literature, by studying man in 
himself and in his relations with the world, 
imbues him with the sentiment of the pos- 
sible concordance of the individual with the 
universe ; the arts make him love creation by 
unravelling and bringing into the light and 
into relief all that is beautiful in it relatively 
to man, and all that in consequence should 
render it lovely, respected, and dear to him; 
religion, finally, seeks to be a bond between 
all men and a bond between all men and God ; 
it sketches the plan of universal brotherhood 
which is ideally the last state of humanity, 
a state which no doubt it will never attain, 
but which it is essential it should imagine 
and believe to be possible, without which it 
always would be drawn towards animality 
more and much more than it is. 

The Hegelian philosophy has exercised an 
immense influence throughout Europe not 
only on philosophic studies, but on history, 
art, and literature. It may be regarded as 
the last -'universal system" and as the most 



228 Initiation into Philosophy 

daring that has been attempted by the human 
mind. 

Schopenhauer. — Schopenhauer was the 
philosopher of the will. Persuaded, like 
Leibnitz, that man is an epitome and a 
picture of the world, and that the world 
resembles us (which is hypothetical), he takes 
up the thought of Leibnitz, changing and 
transforming it thus: All the universe is not 
thought, but all the universe is will; thought 
is only an accident of the will which appears 
in the superior animals; but the will, which 
is the foundation of man, is the foundation of 
all; the universe is a compound of wills that 
act. All beings are wills which possess 
organs conformed to their purpose. It is 
the will to he which gave claws to the lion, 
tusks to the boar, and intelligence to man, 
because he was the most unarmed of animals, 
just as to one who becomes blind it gives 
extraordinarily sensitive and powerful sense 
of hearing, smell, and touch. Plants strive 
towards light by their tops and towards 
moisture by their roots; the seed turns itself 



Nineteenth Century : Germany 229 

in the earth to send forth its stalk upwards 
and its rootlet downward. In minerals there 
are "constant tendencies" which are nothing 
but obscure wills; what we currently term 
weight, fluidity, impenetrability, electricity, 
chemical affinities, are nothing but natural 
wills or inconscient wills. Because of this, 
the diverse wills opposing and clashing with 
one another, the world is a war of all against 
all and of everything literally against every- 
thing; and the world is a scene of carnage. 
The truth is that will is an evil and is the 
evil. What is needed for happiness is to kill 
the will, to destroy the wish to be. — But this 
would be the end of existence? — And in fact 
to be no more or not to be at all is the true 
happiness and it would be necessary to blow 
up the whole world in an explosion for it to 
escape unhappiness. At least, as Buddhism 
desired and, in some degree, though less, 
Christianity also, it is necessary to make an 
approach to death by a kind of reduction to 
the absolute minimum of will, by detachment 
and renunciation pushed as far as can be. 



230 Initiation into Philosophy 

Nietzsche. — A very respectful but highly- 
independent and untractable pupil of 
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche "turns Schopen- 
hauer inside out" as it were, saying: Yes, 
assuredly the will to be is everything; but 
precisely because of that it is essential not to 
oppose but to follow it and to follow it as far 
as it will lead us. But is it not true that it 
will lead to suffering? Be sure of that, but 
in suffering there is an intoxication of pain 
which is quite comprehensible; for it is the 
intoxication of the will in action; and this 
intoxication is an enjoyment too and in any 
case a good thing; for it is the end to which 
we are urged by our nature composed of 
will and of hunger for existence. Now wis- 
dom, like happiness, is to follow our nature. 
The happiness and wisdom of man is to obey 
his will for power, as the wisdom and happi- 
ness of water is to flow towards the sea. 

From these ideas is derived a morality of 
violence which can be legitimately regarded 
as immoral and which, in any case, is neither 
Buddhist nor Christian, but which is sus- 



Nineteenth Century: Germany 231 

ceptible of several interpretations, all the 
more so because Nietzsche, who was a poet, 
never fails, whilst always artistically very 
fine, to fall into plenty of contradictions. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND 

The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism: Lamarck 
(French), Darwin, Spencer 

Transformism and Evolution. — The great 
philosophic invention of the English of the 
nineteenth century has been the idea, based 
on a wide knowledge of natural history, 
that there never was creation. The animal 
species had been considered by all the philo- 
sophers (except Epicurus and the Epicu- 
reans) as being created once and for all and 
remaining invariable. Nothing of the kind. 
Matter, eternally fruitful, has transformed 
itself first into plants, then into lower ani- 
mals, then into higher animals, then into 
man; our ancestor is the fish; tracing back 
yet more remotely, our ancestor is the plant. 
Transformation (hence the name trans- 
232 



Nineteenth Century: England 233 

formism), discrimination and separation of 
species, the strongest individuals of each 
kind alone surviving and creating descend- 
ants in their image which constitute a species ; 
evolution (hence the name evolutionism) 
of living nature thus operating from the 
lowest types to the highest and therefore 
the most complicated; there is nothing but 
that in the world. 

Lamarck; Darwin; Spencer. — The French- 
man Lamarck in the eighteenth century had 
already conceived this idea; Darwin, purely 
a naturalist, set it forth clearly, Spencer 
again stated it and drew from it consequences 
of general philosophy. Thus, to Spencer, 
the evolutionist theory contains no immoral- 
ity. On the contrary, the progressive trans- 
formation of the human species is an ascent 
towards morality; from egoism is born 
altruism because the species, seeking its 
best law and its best condition of happiness, 
perceives a greater happiness in altruism; 
seeking its best law and its best condition of 
happiness, perceives that a greater happiness 



234 Initiation into Philosophy 

lies in order, regular life, social life, etc.; so 
that humanity raises itself to a higher and yet 
higher morality by the mere fact of adapting 
itself better to the conditions of the life of 
humanity. Morality develops physiologi- 
cally as the germ becomes the stem and the 
bud becomes the flower. 

As for religion it is the domain of the 
unknowable. That is not to assert that it is 
nothing. On the contrary it is something 
formidable and immense. It is the feeling 
that something, apart from all that we know, 
surpasses us and that we shall never know it. 
Now this feeling at the same time maintains 
us in a humility highly favourable to the 
health of the soul and also in a serene con- 
fidence in the mysterious being who pre- 
sides over universal evolution and who, no 
doubt, is the all-powerful and eternal soul 
of it. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE 

The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin 
The Positivist School: Auguste Comte 
The Kantist School: Renouvier 
Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan 

Laromiguiere : Royer-Collard. — Emerging 
from the school of Condillac, France saw 
Laromiguiere who was a sort of softened 
Condillac, less trenchant, and not insensible 
to the influence of Rousseau ; but he was little 
more than a clear and elegant professor of 
philosophy. Royer-Collard introduced into 
France the Scottish philosophy (Thomas 
Reid, Dugald Stewart) and did not depart 
from it or go beyond it; but he set it forth 
with magnificent authority and with a re- 
markable invention of clear and magisterial 
formulae. 

Maine de Biran. — Maine de Biran was a 
235 



236 Initiation into Philosophy 

renovator. He attached himself to Des- 
cartes linking the chain anew that had for 
so long been interrupted. He devoted his 
attention to the notion of ego. In full 
reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, 
he restored a due activity to the ego; he 
made it a force not restricted to the reception 
of sensations, which transform themselves, 
but one which seized upon, elaborated, linked 
together, and combined them. For him then, 
as for Descartes, but from a fresh point of 
view, the voluntary deed is the primitive 
deed of the soul and the will is the foundation 
of man. Also, the will is not all man; man 
has, so to say, three lives superimposed but 
very closely inter-united and which cannot 
do without one another : the life of sensation, 
the life of will, and the life of love. The 
life of sensation is almost passive, with a 
commencement of activity which consists in 
classifying and organizing the sensations ; the 
life of will is properly speaking the "human" 
life; the life of love is the life of activity and 
yet again of will, but which unites the human 



Nineteenth Century: France 237 

with the divine life. By the ingenious and 
profound subtlety of his analyses, Maine de 
Biran has placed himself in the front rank of 
French thinkers and, in any case, he is one of 
the most original. 

Victor Cousin and His Disciples. — Victor 
Cousin, who appears to have been influenced 
almost concurrently by Maine de Biran, 
Royer-Collard, and the German philosophy, 
yielded rapidly to a tendency which is 
characteristically French and is also, per- 
haps, good, and which consists in seeing 
"some good in all the opinions," and he was 
eclectic, that is, a borrower. His maxim, 
which he had no doubt read in Leibnitz, 
was that the systems are "true in what they 
affirm and false in what they deny." Start- 
ing thence, he rested upon both the English 
and German philosophy, correcting one by 
the other. Personally his tendency was to 
make metaphysics come from philosophy 
and to prove God by the human soul and the 
relations of God with the world by the 
relations of man with matter. To him God 



238 Initiation into Philosophy 

is always an augmented human soul. All 
philosophies, not to mention all religions, 
have rather an inclination to consider things 
thus: but this tendency is particularly 
marked in Cousin. In the course of his 
career, which was diversified, for he was at 
one time a professor and at another a states- 
man, he varied somewhat, because before 
1830 he became very Hegelian, and after 
1830 he harked back towards Descartes, 
endeavouring especially to make philosophic 
instruction a moral priesthood; highly cau- 
tious, very well-balanced, feeling great dis- 
trust of the unassailable temerities of the one 
and in sympathetic relations with the other. 
What has remained of this eclecticism is an 
excellent thing, the great regard for the 
history of philosophy, which had never been 
held in honour in France and which, since 
Cousin, has never ceased to be so. 

The principal disciples of Cousin were Jouf- 
froy, Damiron, Emile Saisset, and the great 
moralist Jules Simon, well-known because of 
the important political part he played, 



Nineteenth Century: France 239 

Lamennais. — Lamennais, long celebrated 
for his great book, Essay on Indifference in 
the Matter of Religion, then, when he had 
severed himself from Rome, by his Words of 
a Believer and other works of revolutionary 
spirit, was above all a publicist; but he was 
a philosopher, properly speaking, in his Sketch 
of a Philosophy. To him, God is neither the 
Creator, as understood by the early Christ- 
ians, nor the Being from whom the world 
emanates, as others have thought. He has 
not created the world from nothing; but He 
has created it; He created it from Himself, 
He made it issue from His substance; and 
He made it issue by a purely voluntary act. 
He created it in His own image ; it is not man 
alone who is in the image of God, but the 
whole world. The three Persons of God, 
that is, the three characteristics, power, 
intelligence, and love are found — diminished 
and disfigured indeed, but yet are to be found 
— in every being in the universe. They are 
especially our own three powers, under the 
form of will, reason, sympathy; they are 



240 Initiation into Philosophy 

also the three powers of society, under the 
forms of executive power, deliberation, and 
fraternity. Every being, individual or col- 
lective, has in it a principle of death if it can- 
not reproduce however imperfectly all the 
three terms of this trinity without the loss 
of one. 

Auguste Comte. — Auguste Comte, a mathe- 
matician, versed also in all sciences, con- 
structed a pre-eminently negative philosophy 
in spite of his great pretension to replace 
the negations of the eighteenth century by 
a positive doctrine; above all else he denied 
all authority and denied to metaphysics 
the right of existence. Metaphysics ought 
not to exist, do not exist, are a mere nothing. 
We know nothing, we can know nothing, 
about the commencement or the end of things, 
or yet their essence or their object; philo- 
sophy has always laid down as its task a 
general explanation of the universe; it is 
precisely this general explanation, all general 
explanation of the aggregate of things, which 
is impossible. This is the negative part of 



Nineteenth Century: France 241 

"positivism." It is the only one which has 
endured and which is the credo or rather 
the non credo of a fairly large number of 
minds. 

The affirmative part of the ideas of Comte 
was this : what can be done is to make a classi- 
fication of sciences and a philosophy of his- 
tory. The classification of sciences according 
to Comte, proceeding from the most simple 
to the most complex — that is, from mathe- 
matics to astronomy, physics, chemistry, 
biology to end at sociology, is generally con- 
sidered by the learned as interesting but 
arbitrary. The philosophy of history, ac- 
cording to Comte, is this: humanity passes 
through three states: theological, meta- 
physical, positive. The theological state (an- 
tiquity) consists in man explaining everything 
by continual miracles; the metaphysical 
state (modern times) consists in man explain- 
ing everything by ideas, which he still con- 
tinues to consider somewhat as beings, by 
abstractions, entities, vital principle, attrac- 
tion, gravitation, soul, faculty of the soul, etc. 



242 Initiation into Philosophy 

The positive state consists in that man 
explains and will explain all things, or rather 
limits himself and will limit himself to verify- 
ing them, by the links that he will see they 
have with one another, links he will content 
himself with observing and subsequently 
with controlling by experiment. Also there 
is always something of the succeeding state 
in the preceding state and the ancients did 
not ignore observation, and there is always 
something of the preceding state in the suc- 
ceeding state and we have still theological 
and metaphysical habits of mind, theological 
and metaphysical "residues," and perhaps 
it will be always thus; but for theology to 
decline before metaphysics and metaphysics 
before science is progress. 

Over and above this, Comte in the last 
portion of his life — as if to prove his doctrine 
of residues and to furnish an example — ■ 
founded a sort of religion, a pseudo-religion, 
the religion of humanity. Humanity must 
be worshipped in its slow ascent towards 
intellectual and moral perfection (and, in 



Nineteenth Century: France 243 

consequence, we should specially worship 
humanity to come; but Comte might reply 
that humanity past and present is venerable 
because it bears in its womb the humanity 
of the future). The worship of this new re- 
ligion is the commemoration and veneration 
of the dead. These last conceptions, fruits 
of the sensibility and of the imagination of 
Auguste Comte, have no relation with the 
basis of his doctrine. 

Renouvier. — After him, by a vigorous 
reaction, Renouvier restored the philosophy 
of Kant, depriving it of its too symmetrical, 
too minutely systematic, too scholastic char- 
acter and bringing it nearer to facts; from 
him was to come the doctrine already men- 
tioned, "pragmatism," which measures the 
truth of every idea by the moral consequence 
that it contains. 

Taine. — Very different and attaching him- 
self to the general ideas of Comte, Hippolyte 
Taine believed only in what has been ob- 
served, experimented, and demonstrated ; but 
being also as familiar with Hegel as with 



244 Initiation into Philosophy 

Comte, with Spencer as with Condillac, he 
never doubted that the need of going beyond 
and escaping from oneself was also a fact, a 
human fact eternal among humanity, and of 
this fact he took account as of a fact observed 
and proved, saying if man is on one side a 
"fierce and lascivious gorilla," on the other 
side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a 
double nature, mysterious hymen," as 
Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the 
baseness in ideas and actions as well as all 
the sublimity in ideas and actions of human- 
ity. Personally he was a Stoic and his 
practice was the continuous development of 
the intelligence regarded as the condition and 
guarantee of morality. 

Renan. — Renan, destined for the ecclesi- 
astical profession and always preserving 
profound traces of his clerical education, was, 
nevertheless, a Positivist and believed only 
in science, hoping everything from it in youth 
and continuing to venerate it at least during 
his mature years. Thus formed, a "Christ- 
ian Positivist, " as has been said, as well as a 



Nineteenth Century: France 245 

poet above all else, he could not proscribe 
metaphysics and had a weakness for them 
with which perhaps he reproached himself. 
He extricated himself from this difficulty by 
declaring all metaphysical conceptions to be 
only "dreams," but sheltered, so to say, by 
this concession he had made and this pre- 
caution he had taken, he threw himself into 
the dream with all his heart and reconstituted 
God, the immortal soul, the future existence, 
eternity and creation, giving them new, 
unforeseen, and fascinating names. It was 
only the idea of Providence — that is, of the 
particular and circumstantial intervention 
of God in human affairs, which was intoler- 
able to him and against which he always 
protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, 
"God does not act by particular wills." 
And yet he paid a compliment, which seems 
sincere, to the idea of grace, and if there be a 
particular and circumstantial intervention by 
God in human affairs, it is certainly grace 
according to all appearances. 

He was above all an amateur of ideas, a 



246 Initiation into Philosophy 

dilettante in ideas, toying with them with in- 
finite pleasure, like a superior Greek sophist, 
and in all French philosophy no one calls 
Plato to mind more than he does. 

He possessed a charming mind, a very 
lofty character, and was a marvellous writer. 

To-day. — The living French philosophers 
whom we shall content ourselves with naming 
because they are living and receive contem- 
porary criticism rather than that of history, 
are MM. Fouillee, Theodule Ribot, Liard, 
Durckheim, Izoulet, and Bergson. 

The Future of Philosophy. — It is impossi- 
ble to forecast in what direction philosophy 
will move. The summary history we have 
been able to trace sufficiently shows, as it 
seems to us, that it has no regular advance 
such that by seeing how it has progressed one 
can conjecture what path it will pursue. 
It seems in no sense to depend, or at all 
events, to depend remarkably little, at any 
period, on the general state of civilization 
around it, and even for those who believe in 
a philosophy of history there is not, as it 



Nineteenth Century: France 247 

appears to me, a philosophy of the history 
of philosophy. The only thing that can be 
affirmed is that philosophy will always exist 
in response to a need of the human mind, and 
that it will always be both an effort to gather 
scientific discoveries into some great general 
ideas and an effort to go beyond science and 
to seek as it can the meaning of the universal 
enigma ; so that neither philosophy, properly 
speaking, nor even metaphysics will ever 
disappear. Nietzsche has said that life is 
valuable only as the instrument of knowledge. 
However eager humanity may be and be- 
come for branches of knowledge, it will be 
always passionately and indefatigably anx- 
ious about complete knowledge. 



INDEX OF NAMES CITED 
A 

PAGE 

Abelard 94-98 

iEnesidemus 57 

Agrippa 57 

Agrippa, Cornelius 1 15, 1 16 

Ailly, Peter d' 112 

Albertus Magnus 100 

Alexander the Great 31, 38, 39, 55 

Anaxagoras 6, 14, 23 

Anaximander 4 

Anselm, St 89-93, I 4 I 

Antisthenes 37, 38, 43 

Apollodorus 48 

Arcesilaus 56 

Arete 41 

Aristippus 39, 43, 45, 47, 132 

Aristo 52 

Aristobulus 74 

Aristophanes 16 

Aristotle 31-35, 36, 55, 100, 102, 109, 117, 118 

Arius 71 

Arnauld " 160 

Atticus 48 

Augustine, St 78-81,87,90 

Averroes 89 

Avicenna 89 

B 

Bacon, Francis 123-127, 159 

Bacon, Roger 108, 124 

Beaconsfield 45 

Bergson 246 

Berkeley 187-189, 194, 214 

Bonaventura, St 106, 107 

249 



250 Index 



PAGE 

Bossuet 160 

Bruno, Giordano 120 

Brutus 52 

Buridan in, 112 



Calvin 72, 120 

Campanella 120-123 

Cardan 115 

Carneades 57 

Cato 52 

Champeaux, William of 94, 95 

Charles the Bald 87 

Christina of Sweden 138 

Chrysippus 52 

Cicero 51, 52, 57 

Cleanthes 52 

Clement, St., of Alexandria 79 

Comte, Auguste 123, 240-243 

Condillac 198-199, 235-243 

Corneille 146 

Cousin, Victor 160, 237, 238 

Crantor 36 

Crates 36, 39, 49 

D 

Damiron 238 

Darwin 233 

Democritus 10, 1 1 

Descartes 121, 137-167, 173, 175, 177, 181, 186, 189, 

194, 236 

Diderot 197-198 

Diogenes 39 

Durand de Saint-Pourgain no 

Durckheim 94, 246 

E 

Empedocles 6 

Epictetus 52 

Epicurus 11, 44-48, 49, 160, 212, 232 

Euhemerus 41 



Index 251 

PAGE 
F 

Fenelon l6 ° 

Fichte 214, 215 

Fontenelle l6 ° 

Fouillee 2 4 6 

Franklin .... J 9 

G 

Gassendi ~-~ • ' J J 59 

Gerbert 89 

Gerson 112,113 

Gorgias 10, 13, H, 37 

H 

Harvey I2 ° 

Havet, Ernest 74 

Hegel 217-228, 243 

Hegesias 4 l 

Helvetius 197, 198 

Heraclitus 4. 5» 2 3 

Herillus 5 2 

Hermarchus 48 

Hobbes, Thomas 127-133, 159, 185, 197 

Holbach, d' 197. 198 

Horace 40, 41. 47, 48 

Hugo, Victor 180, 244 

Hugo de Saint-Victor 97 

Hume, David 189-194. 196, 197, 198, 200 

I 

Iamblichus 6 3» J H 

Izoulet 246 

J 

James 1 12 4 

Jesus Christ 66, 67, 68, 71, 75 

Joan of Navarre 112 

Jouffroy 2 38 

Justinian 63 



252 Index 

PAGE 
K 

Kant 20, 186, 197, 200-213, 220, 243 

L 

La Bruyere 37 

Lamarck 233 

Lamennais 239 

Laromiguiere 235 

Leibnitz 160, 173-180, 186, 200, 228 

Leo X 115 

Leucippus 10 

Liard 246 

Locke 160, 181-186, 194, 196, 197 

Louis XIV 72 

Lucian 39 

Lucretius 1 1, 48 

Lulle, Raymond 106, 107 

M 

Maine de Biran 160, 235-237 

Malebranche 148, 160-165, 189, 245 

Manes 70 

Marcus Aurelius 52, 74 

Menippus 39 

Metrodorus. 48 

Moderatus 54.75 

Moliere 160 

Montaigne 18,41 

Moses 75 

N 

Nemesius 54. 75 

Nero 74 

Nicomachus 54, 75 

Nietzsche 20, 230, 231 , 247 

O 

Ockham, William of 1 10, 1 1 1 

Origen 76, 77 



Index 253 

PAGE 



Paracelsus 115 

Parmenides 9, 12, 23 

Pascal 13, 57, 106, 160, 171, 179 

Paul, St 64 

Pericles 6 

Philip the Fair 1 1 1 

Philo 75 

Pico della Mirandola 115 

Plato 14, 22-34, 44, 45, 69, 75, 92, 99, 123, 212, 246 

Pliny the Younger 48 

Plotinus 59-63 

Plutarch 54 

Poincar6, Henri 57 

Polemo 36 

Polystratus 48 

Pomponazzo 117-119 

Porphyry 63 

Prodicus 13.14 

Protagoras X 3.I4 

Pyrrho 55 

Pythagoras 7, 23 

R 

Reid, Thomas 194, 235 

Renan 244, 245 

Renouvier 243 

Reuchlin 115 

Ribot, Theodule 246 

Richard de Saint- Victor 98 

Roscelin 93 

Rousseau, J. J 180, 196, 197, 235 

Royer-Collard 235 



Saisset, Emile 238 

Schelling 216, 217 

Schopenhauer 123, 175, 228-229 

Scotus Erigena 87, 88 

Seneca 47, 52 

Servetus, Michael 119, 120 



254 Index 



PAGE 

Sextus Empiricus 57 

Shakespeare 124 

Simon, Jules 238 

Socrates 6, 10, 15, 16-21, 38, 40, 49, 56, 67 

Spencer, Herbert 233, 234, 244 

Speusippus 36 

Spinoza 160, 165-173, 192 

Stewart, Dugald 194, 235 

T 

Taine, Hippolyte 243, 244 

Thales 4 

Theodosius 71 

Theophrastus 36 

Thomas Aquinas, St 100-105 

Thrasea 52 

Timon 55 

V 

Vanini 119, 120 

Vauvenargues 1 53 

Vico ; 156 

Villon 112 

Vincent of Beauvais 100 

Voltaire 41, 180, 185, 196, 197 

W 

William of Auvergne 100 

Wolf 200 

X 

Xenocrates 36 

Xenophanes 9 

Xenophon 17, 18, 22 

Z 

Zeno (of Citium) 47, 49, 52, 212 

Zeno (of Elea) 10, 12, 37 

Zoroaster 7, 70 



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